



Class _;£Eu. 
Book Xt 



CoBiiglitN". 



COFKRIOIIT DEPOSIT. 



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THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 
AND HIS APOSTLES 



THE 

CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST 
AND HIS APOSTLES 



HISTORICAL STUDIES OF FUNDAMENTAL 
NEW TESTAMENT PROBLEMS 



y\' 



.^^ 



BY 



JNO. J. TIGERT, D.D., LL.D, 

EDITOR OF THE METHODIST QUARTERLY REVIEW 



" Te shall know the truth, and the truth shall 
make you free."— }'E.svs Christ 



Nashville, Tenn. ; Dallas, Tex. 

Publishing House of the M. E. Church, South 

Smith & Lamar, Agents 

1905 



LIBRARY or CONGRESS 
Two Cooies Received 

FEB 12 1906 

/-, CoDyriffht Entry 

CLASS (X XXc. No, 
/ 3 ¥3 7> 

COPY B. 






Copyright 

1905 

By Smith &. Lamar 



TO 

MARY, HOLLAND, AND JOHN 



PREFACE 

The prevailingly negative and destructive tend- 
encies and results of much current theological 
criticism have begotten not ill-grounded fears 
among the conservative, and some grave mis- 
givings as to their actual position among those 
liberals who are not wholly given over to be- 
lieve a lie. Meanwhile, ordinary mortals must 
have a shelter in the time of the storm. To 
throw up such a shelter is the object of the fol- 
lowing constructive studies. They are not 
polemical. They aim to be historical. They 
are the sober reflections of one who abides in 
essential orthodoxy after a wide range of read- 
ing that has tended, more or less, to shake the 
foundations. The author trusts that he has an 
open mind for truth. He believes with the 
Apostle that whatsoever doth make manifest 
is light. The summing up of the theological 
situation which he was compelled to make for 
his own mental and religious peace, he is hope- 

(vii) 



\Hi 



Preface 



ful may perform a like office for those who are 
similarly afflicted. He has endeavored to pre- 
serve breadth of sympathy with Christian 
scholars of many types; but to that breadth 
he could not sacrifice the breath of life which 
comes from Christ alone. In these pages, he 
endeavors to give, with sincerity and calmness, 
his reasons for continuing to believe that one is 
his Master, even Christ, and that all others are 
but brethren. It is hoped that the standpoint 
of generous and sympathetic, and yet con- 
vinced and unfearing, orthodoxy from which 
these pages are written will not prove offensive 
to those who are of another mind, and who 
have supplied so much excellent literature of a 
contrary tendency which has provoked, as he 
hopes, a wholesome reaction in the mind of the 
author. If this little book shall bring repose to 
inquiring and disquieted spirits, the prayer and 
purpose of its writer will have been answered. 

JnO. J. TiGERT. 
Spring Hill, i Jidy^ 1905. 



CONTENTS 



I 

FAGE 

The Nature of the Christian Religion i 



II 
The Vocation of Jesus the Proof of His God- 67 

HEAD , 

III 

The Foundation of Christendom 107 

IV 
Biblical Criticism and the Christian Faith. . . 151 

APPENDIX 

Pfleiderer's " Early Christian Conception 

OF Christ " 185 

Loisy's "The Gospel and the Church " 196 

INDEXES 

Authors Quoted or Referred to 205 

Scripture Passages Quoted or Explained. . . . 207 

(ix) 



I 

THE NATURE OF THE CHRISTIAN 
RELIGION 



THE NATURE OF THE CHRISTIAN 
RELIGION 

On the surface at least it wears a surprising 
look that, at the beginning of the twentieth 
Christian century, men should still be inquir- 
ing. What is Christianity? That millions of 
humble men and women in many generations 
should have had living experience of its real- 
ity and worth does not diminish this surprise 
at the present attitude of the scholars and 
savants. The inquiry might seem the more 
reasonable, or the less surprising, if it pro- 
ceeded only from the scholars of alien civiliza- 
tions, such as that of Japan in the Far East; 
which are but now beginning to be penetrated 
by the spirit and institutions of Christendom, 
if not of Christianity. But the question is 
started at the centers of Christian learning and 
by the leaders of theological thought. At 

(3) 



The Christianity of Christ 



Berlin Professor Harnack, perhaps the fore- 
most Christian historical scholar of our times, 
whose dating of the early Christian docu- 
ments^ and history of the later Christian dog- 
mas^ are alike in their scientific exhaustiveness, 
has published the brilliant and reverent trea- 
tise^ that has been turned into English under 
the title, ''What is Christianity?"; while here 
in America, at the Union Theological Sem- 
inary in New York, Professor Adams Brown 
has paralleled Herr Harnack's title and work 
in a volume^ profoundly and widely learned, if 
not so charming and sensitively religious. 
Even our Roman Cathohc friends have not 
remained undisturbed among the swift-rush- 
ing currents of the day, and at Paris Alfred 
Loisy's work^ divides public attention with the 

^ "Chronologic der altchristlichen Literatur." 

" "Dogmengeschichtc." 

' "Das Wesen des Christentums." 

*"The Essence of Christianity." 

'"The Gospel and the Church": largely a reply to 
Harnack, but containing independent views that Roman 
theologians must attend to. 



And His Apostles 



new Gallicanism which Premier Combes has 
precipitated upon Pius X. 

Thus ahke in CathoHc and in Protestant the- 
ology, at Berhn, Paris, and New York, the 
learned representatives of three of the foremost 
peoples of the modern world, and of widely 
different schools of doctrine, have consented 
together at least in this, that they think it nec- 
essary, at the present stadium of man's knowl- 
edge, to set forth afresh, according to the light 
that is in them, the essential nature of the 
Christian religion. 

These are not superficial men. The posts 
they occupy, as well as the works they have 
produced, certify that they are penetrated with 
a vivid sense of the deepest tendencies and 
needs of the time. Upon the threadbare theme 
of the modern progress in physical science and 
mechanical invention I need not dwell ; though 
the very mass and intricacy of the facts condi- 
tion the intellectual outlook and fix the far 
horizons of the scientific mind. So far as fluid 



The Christianity of Christ 



physical theory has begun to soHdify in the 
dogmatic materialism of a Haeckel/ or the 
crudities of a Goldwin Smith/ it is perhaps 
enough to allow it to break and fall of its own 
weight. Scientific, philosophical, and theolog- 
ical scholars seem fairly agreed in this judg- 
ment on materialism. A deeper conditioning 
of the intellect of modern man, and therefore 
of the Christian as of all other standpoints, has 
issued from the fresh, full fountains of ideal- 
istic philosophy. Readers of Ritschl^ and 
Kaftan^ and Hermann^^ and Harnack^^ ; of 
Fairbairn^^ and the Cairds,^^ and an almost 
countless host of English, Scottish, and Amer- 

' "The Riddle of the World." 
' "Guesses at the Riddle of Existence." 
® "Justification and Reconciliation." 
" "The Truth of the Christian Religion." 
" "The Christian's Communion with God." 
" Works mentioned above. 

'■ "Philosophy of the Christian Religion" ; "The Place 
of Christ in Modern Theology." 

""The Evolution of Religion"; Discourses. 



And His Apostles 



ican theologians, know that Leibnitz and Kant 
and Hegel and Lotze, whatever corrections of 
their conclusions may be necessary, have not 
lived in vain. Lastly, Christian philological 
and historical scholarship, directed alike to the 
Old Testament and the New, but especially to 
the former, and drawing within its widespread 
net the ancient civilizations and religions of 
Babylon and Assyria/^ has taken us to the ulti- 
mate sources of Semitic religion, so far as they 
are historically explicable. Surely, then, these 
are grounds enough for the dissipation of the 
surprise we were at first disposed to feel at the 
attitude and inquiries of Harnack and Brown 
and Loisy, even if taken to be typical of the 
theological situation in Germany and America 

"Sayce, in numerous works; Hilprecht, "Explora- 
tions in Bible Lands during the Nineteenth Century"; 
McCurdy, "History, Prophecy, and the Monuments"; 
Rogers, "History of Babylonia and Assyria"; Hommel, 
"The Ancient Hebrew Tradition"; Delitzsch, "Babel 
und Bibel," and the numerous replies to the latter. 



8 



Tlic Clirisfiajiity of Christ 



and France. We may, perhaps, without pre- 
sumption join them in a fresh search for the 
innermost essence of the Christian religion, — 
a conception of it that shah draw the purest 
and best minds of our day, bewildered by the 
clamor of many voices on every side, to become 
learners in the school of Christ. 

I do not deem it necessary or expedient to 
enter into any general examination of the 
w^orks of the authors to whom reference is 
made above, — though their books are brief, 
and the three may be read in a few days, — or 
even to indicate in detail the grounds on which 
their conclusions have proved unsatisfactory. 
Stiffice it to say that the books have been in- 
terestedly and sympathetically read; that the 
reading of them is, in part, the genesis, — at 
least the immediate genesis, — of the present es- 
say; and that those who may be curious to 
measure the angle of my divergence from such 
scholars, at whose feet I should gladly sit in 
many things, may gather their materials by a 



And His Apostles 



comparison of the processes here pursued on 
a small scale, and the results here reached, with 
those which have proved unsatisfying. Hav- 
ing had, I may humbly claim, some experience 
of the power of the religion of Christ from my 
very youth, and having been drawn through 
many years by personal inclination, as well as 
by editorial duty and my vow as a presbyter in 
the Church of God, to a fairly close and broad 
study of the literature of the issues involved,^ ^ 
I trust I may, without immodesty, also at- 
tempt to answer the question, What is Chris- 
tianity? and to declare those things which are 
most surely believed in the Christian commu- 
nity. 

I .shall begin with a definition : with the ex- 
planation and defense of the several elements 
of this definition, or historical and spiritual 

^^Somewhat elaborate reviews of nearly all the 
books mentioned in the preceding footnotes will be 
found from my hand in the pages of The Methodist 
Quarterly Review for the last ten years. 



lo The Christianity of Christ 

conception, of the Christian reHgion, the rest 
of this chapter will be occupied. 

Christianity is the religion of God's redeem- 
ing lozTj manifested in the Incarnate life, the 
Atoning death, and the glorious Resurrection 
of Jesus Christ, th^ Founder of the Kingdom 
of God, whose citizens are become sons of God 
hy the power of his Spirit, and brothers of all 
mankind. 

First of all, Christianity is religion. It is 
not theolog}-; though there is, of course, a 
Christian theolog};. since man must reflect on 
his religion as he does on all things else he ex- 
periences. This theolog}', so far as vital, is a 
product of the religion, and a hedge round 
about it; it is not the root from which the re- 
ligion springs, nor the trellis upon which this 
vine of God's planting grows. At its best, the- 
olog}' is a correct human science of divine 
things. The divine things are permanent — 
nay eternal, and hence unchangeable. With a 
true instinct for the permanence of religion. 



And His Apostles ii 

our Roman Catholic friends have mistakenly 
transferred its unchangeability to its dogmas — 
the formulas of historical origin and develop- 
ment which undertake to measure and to illu- 
mine, or simply to protect (perhaps for only a 
given age), its realities. Dogmas, like all 
other scientific formulas with a human history, 
can maintain their place in sound thinking 
and assured conviction only by maintaining at 
the same time a consistent place in the sum 
total of known realities ; or, at least, their har- 
mony with man's whole verifiable conception 
of the world. Through nineteen centuries 
Christianity has maintained its vital touch with 
human life and interests through a body of 
progressing and enlarging dogma, ever chang- 
ing through the external apologetic interest 
Vv^hich shapes it, and yet never surrendering the 
changeless realities of religion which it in- 
closes. The core of dogma is divine. Whether, 
at the beginning of this twentieth century, the 
vastly greater and more complex volume of 



12 The Chrisiiaiiiiy of Christ 

man's kno^v ledge is to bring at last a fatal and 
final breach with that divine order of the world 
for which Christianit}- stands., is the vtry ques- 
tion which makes the modem crisis. That the 
Christian religion has so far fairly met the new 
conditions is hardly doubtful ; that it will con- 
tinue to meet them, it is the effort of apologetic 
theologians to show: in any case, it is certain 
that the modem mind is forever done with an 
acknowledged dualism in knowledge and ex- 
perience. The dogma must live its Hfe in the 
intellect that is informed with all other knowl- 
edge. 

To Christianit}' belongs, not onl}- the un- 
changeableness of religion, but also the un- 
changeableness of history. This religion has 
been mediated to humanity by facts. Incarna- 
tion, Atonement, Resurrection appeal to us as 
facts. If we find Cardinal Xewman^^ placing 
he superiorit}' of Romanism to Protestantism 

In his "Apologia Pro \"ita Sua" and elsewhere. 



And His Apostles 13 

in its objectivity (and so Loisy), it is because 
too often a pseudo- Protestantism, in its abuse 
of the right of private judgment, has seemed to 
suspend realities, both of the reHgious and of 
the historical o'rder, — the facts of man's re- 
ligious nature, as well as the objective, histor- 
ical facts of Christianity, — upon the fancies 
and vagaries of personal opinion and individ- 
ualistic self-assertion and conceit; as if these 
facts could be annihilated by disbelief of them, 
or in any degree altered by our personal atti- 
tude toward them. "He that rejecteth me and 
receiveth not my words hath one that judgeth 
him : the word that I have spoken, the same 
shall judge him in the last day."^^ The foun- 
dation facts of Christianity have a vei*y differ- 
ent objectivity from that of blinking Madon- 
nas, utterly meaningless and useless even in 
the system of those who credit them ; and from 
that of the priestly hocus-pocus of the altar, 

"John xii. 48. 



The CJiristianity of Christ 



which by the distinction of substance and at- 
tributes made by a false reahsm is withdrawn 
from the inspection of the senses: for these 
Christian facts are estabhshed, either by the 
psychology of religious experience, old as the 
world and broad as humanity, on the one hand, 
or on the basis of the veracity of the human 
senses and the trustworthiness of the ordinary 
canons of historical testimony, on the other. 
So established, they are immovable and un- 
changeable foundations, possessed of an ob- 
jectivity which man cannot alter; though, ac- 
cording to the fixed luws of human probation, 
— probation in both the intellectual and the 
moral sense, — they have to make themselves 
good afresh, like all other knowledge, in the 
consciousness of each new generation. 

Nor is Christianity philosophy, though capa- 
ble, since truth is one, of philosophical state- 
ment and defense. Nor yet is it ethics, or an 
art of right living. It includes this. It cannot 
be divorced from righteousness. But deeper 



And His Apostles 15 

than ethics, as back of theology and philoso- 
phy, is religion. And what is Religion? 

Religion is the communion of God with the 
human spirit issuing in a life whose center is 
this communion; or, in older phrase, the life 
of God in the soul and life of man. And the 
Christian religion is no other than communicwi 
with God, mediated by Christ and his Spirit. 

If this communion is a delusion, there is no 
religion; and with the denial of the reality of 
religion goes Christianity, and every other ac- 
cepted historical manifestation of the presence 
and energy of God in human life and history. 
This communion includes, of course, two ele- 
ments ; and but two. On the divine side, com- 
munion is self-manifestation ; on the human 
side, it may be summed up in one comprehen- 
sive and most real experience, prayer, which, 
in its widest sense, includes worship and con- 
formity of the will, life, and nature of the 
worshiper to the revealed character and de- 
mand of the worshipful God. 



i6 The Christianity of Christ 

Without tarrying to mark finer distinctions, 
I may notice that the experience of normal 
men with great uniformity develops the knowl- 
edge of self, of the world, and of God. These 
are of tremendous persistence and great uni- 
versality. The permanent disturbance of nor- 
mal apprehension in either of the three spheres, 
or the commingling of the spheres themselves, 
may be accepted as a mark of insanity. Only 
the fool says in his heart, There is no God. 
The experiences of self and the world, as well 
as the self- revelation of God, carry the mind 
in its earliest life through to the knowledge of 
God, which is rarely abandoned, but grows 
with our growth and strengthens with our 
strength. The conviction, like certain vital 
functions in the body, lies deeper than our 
volition or consciousness — and for the same 
reason. When, especially in the master spirits 
of the race, the consciousness and dominance 
of self and the world are reduced to the vanish- 
ing point, the consciousness and power of God 



And His Apostles 17 

are in possession of the field. By every token, 
the Founder of Christianity, alone among men, 
perfectly suppressed self and the world, and 
lived a life of unbroken communion with God 
and of imdisturbed love and loyalty to him. 
For most men, self and the world are nearer 
and more noisy; but God, if deeper and appar- 
ently more silent amid the clamor of the voices 
of the flesh and of the world, is more persist- 
ent; speaks often and powerfully out of the 
silences when the other voices are hushed, or 
out of the bitter experiences that reveal the 
nothingness of self and the world; and he is 
certainly the only satisfying portion of man's 
inmost nature. Fellowship with God was the 
ancient keynote of Hebrew religion that in 
many Psalms,^ ^ for example, contains the 

" Psalms xvi., xlix., Ixxlii., cxxxix. : cf. Kennedy '3 
"St. Paul's Conceptions of the Last Things." "Im- 
mortality is the corollary of religion. If there be reli- 
gion, i. e., if God be, there is immortality, not of the 
soul, but of the whole personal being of man. Ps. xvi. 
9." — A. B. Davidson, Job, p. 296. 

2 



1 8 The Christianity of Christ 

promise of immortality and heralds the victory 
o^'er death and the grave proclaimed by Christ 
and Paul. In truth the so-called consciousness 
of God is only God revealing himself in the 
consciousness. The reality of communion 
with God, and of his self-revelation, is every- 
where assumed in the New Testament. "Flesh 
and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but 
my Father which is in heaven, "^^ said Jesus to 
Peter after his great confession in Cesarea 
Philippi. Though Jesus himself had been for 
long the daily associate and intimate teacher of 
his disciple, the central truth of Christianity, 
upon which as possessed by persons Jesus pur- 
posed to build his Church, had come as an in- 
Vv-ard divine revelation and conviction to Peter : 
into the heart of the Rock Apostle the Divine 
Father whispered the secret of his Son's nature 
and person. 

This self-revelation of God is no peculiar 

'*Matt. xvi. 17. 



And His Apostles 19 

privilege of apostle or prophet : rather apostles 
and prophets, being heirs of the heritage in an 
eminent degree and the earliest recipients of 
the experience, have made the initial and nor- 
mative record in the New Testament which the 
experience of later Christians reproduces ever 
new and powerful in heart and Hfe.^^ ''Eye 
hath not seen nor ear heard, neither have en- 
tered into the heart of man, the things which 
God hath prepared for them that love him. 
But God hath revealed them unto us by his 
Spirit, for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea 
the deep things of God/'^^ That spiritual dis- 
cernment of the deep things of God can come 
only by divine self-manifestation is clear, "For 
what man knoweth the things of a man save 

^ "The Bible itself is an expression of experience. 
If this experience had not continued, the Bible would 
have become only the record of an ancient and forgotten 
life, powerless to preserve Christianity in the world." — 
Dr.W. N. Clarke, "Outline of Christian Theology," p. 18. 

" I Cor. ii. 9, ID. 



20 The Christianity of Christ 

the spirit oi man whicii is in him? Even so the 
things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit 
of God.*'-^ Hence the spiritual man judges all 
these things, while he himself is rightly not 
amenable to the judgment of those who know 
them not. Johji Locke tells us the stor\' of the 
man blind from birth to whom "red** seemed 
like the soimd of a trumpet. Destitute of the 
sense of sight he must express himself in the 
language of hearing: so foreign is the lan- 
guage of heaven to the strangers of earth. 
Even the Christ of history is one with the 
Christ of experience, the latter carr}-ing us in 
oiu" personal consciousness to the Di\-ine Per- 
son and redemptive power of the former, since 
no man can say that Jesus is the Christ but by 
the Holy Ghost. Ever)- Simday the Chris- 
tian presb\i:er dismisses the congregation of 
Christ's people with a challenge to the present 
realitv' of a living experience springing from 

"I Cor. ii. II. 



And His Apostles 21 

the Persons of the Trinity themselves: "The 
grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love 
of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, 
be vi^ith you all."^^ Is it true, or is it not? If 
it is true, Father, Son, and Comforter, accord- 
ing to the promise of Jesus Christ, reside in 
every Christian breast; the high and lofty in- 
habitant of eternity, according to the older He- 
brew conception, dwells with him that is of a 
humble and contrite spirit. 

Thus it is evident that otir ordinary doctrine 
of the witness of the Spirit is too narrow. The 
Spirit witnesses not only to personal accept- 
ance and the forgiveness of sins and the adop- 
tion of sons, but also to the fundamental re- 
alities of the Christian religion, — the love of 
the Father, the mediation of the Son, his own 
indwelling and illumination, — which are bound 
up with forgiveness as one whole. It is in this 
point of view that it becomes evident in what 

^^2 Cor. xiii. 14. 



22 The Christianity of Christ 

sense the "forgiveness of sins" is the heart of 
Christianity as a personal experience and may 
be taken, as it sometimes is, as the whole of 
the gospel. 

Unitarianism appears a simplification of 
Christianity and an elimination of Trinitarian 
mysteries. As such, it should contribute 
mightily to the universal extension of the gos- 
pel. But history belies this expectation. It is 
agreed by the freest and most rationalistic his- 
torians of dogma and of the Church that the 
triumph of Arianism in the fourth century 
would have been the extinction of Christianity ; 
Socinianism exhibited no fructifying power; 
and modern Unitarianism is a corpse of theo- 
logical thought so dead that it savors of disre- 
spect to kick it. ''Everything on which Atha- 
nasius staked hi,s life," says Harnack, "is de- 
scribed in the one sentence, God himself has 
entered into humanity/' Have we not here the 
secret of the universal failure of the Unitarian 
conception of Christianity? If God did not 



And His Apostles 23 

draw nigh to man in Jesus Christ, the raison 
d'etre of Christianity is canceled, and the Chris- 
tian spirit rejects the Unitarian scheme as van- 
ity and Hes. It is an interpretation of the gos- 
pel which annihilates it. So then we conclude 
that Christianity is religion, — the religion of 
the communion of man with God, the God who 
is Father, Son, and Spirit. 

The second virtue of this definition is that 
it traces the Christian religion to its ultimate 
source in the love of God. Any conception of 
religion or any interpretation of the gospel 
that is untrue to the original, essential, un- 
changeable love of God will be cast out as false 
by the Christian conscience. That "God is 
love" is the deepest truth of the divine self- 
manifestation in his Son, in that Son's apostles, 
and in the hearts of all their followers. This 
love is the only hope of sinners and the only 
shelter of humanity. It is of the eternal nature 
of God, unproduced, underived : lest we should 
overlook it, twice within the limits of a brief 



24 The Christianity of Christ 

epistle the Apostle Toh:: tells us that *''God is 
love.**-"^ That the hoHness of God involves 
also the necessan' condemnation of sin may 
have led some to preach as if the text read, 
"God gave his only-begotten Son that he might 
love the world"; but there is no sentiment in 
the Xew Testament even distantly akin to this. 
The atonement is bom of the di\'ine love; not 
the divine love of the atonement. The new- 
bom babe lying upon its mother's breast is the 
most helpless and dependent of earth's crea- 
tures. If the mother love could be transformed 
into malignit)-, the babe's future wotdd be hope- 
less: indeed, instant destruction would be in- 
evitable: it must perish. Likewise, if God 
cotild become the enemy of man and array him- 
self against his child, there could be no deliv- 
erance for the helpless and sinful race. 

But this love is recognized as redeeming 
love. It brings deliverance through the death 

-'I John iv. 8, i6. 



And His Apostles 25 

of Christ from the retributive wrath of a holy 
God and the merited penalty of sin.^^ Christ 
himself is redemption (dnoXirpQacg).^^ This 
love of God, therefore, is directed not to angels, 
but to men ; not to sinless, but to sinful, beings. 
It is active, outgoing, seeking, transitive. It 
removes obstacles. It comes in the person of 
Jesus Christ to seek and to save the lost. It 
pays a price for its own satisfaction. It is 
based on the infinite preciousness of its object 
to the heart of God, apart from moral desert. 
The human soul, even in sin, is a treasure 
whose possession God himself desires and is 
wilHng to purchase at a great price. "A doc- 
trine of atonement,'' well says Dr. James Den- 
ney, "is a doctrine of the cost of forgiveness to 
God." A cheap forgiveness is a kind of moral 
horror, for it can only mean that sin, so terrible 
to man, is nothing to God. This undeserved, 
seeking, saving love directed to the unworthy 

"Rom. iii. 24; Eph. I. 7; Col. i. 14. 
'' I Cor. i. 30. 



26 The Christianity of Christ 

and the outcast is the deepest lesson of the par- 
able of the Lost Son^^ — that crown of all our 
Lord's parabolic sayings. Whatever may be 
involved in the transition from a probationary 
to a punitive state, from the temporal to the 
eternal world of fixed results, there is no rea- 
son to question that the gospel represents this 
love as following the vilest into the depths and 
to the lowermost limit of possible recovery. 

The primary redemptive movement of the 
divine love manifests itself in the Incarnation. 
Here lies the heart of the question in our day 
about the nature of Christianity. The dignity, 
the beauty, the purity, the intellectual original- 
ity and force, the spiritual insight and genius, 
even the moral uniqueness and sinlessness, of 
Jesus are freely, nay gladly, recognized. All 
that realm, the Galilean has conquered. On 
this plane there seems the opportunity of recon- 
ciliation of the religion of Christendom with 

'"Luke XV. 11-32. 



And His Apostles 27 

the science of Christendom, preparatory to the 
universalizing of Christianity. If the reaHty 
of the Incarnation be surrendered, for theology 
itself, as well as general knowledge and com- 
mon intelligence, there seems to be great relief : 
all the puzzles of the dual nature of the Incar- 
nate Person, all the mysteries of the Trinitarian 
existence of the Godhead, are eliminated at 
one stroke ; and Jesus, as the fairest flower of 
humanity, diffuses his fragrance throughout 
the world. It is a tempting suggestion. If 
Christ and Christianity can be reduced within 
the limits of the human, amalgamation with all 
else that is human, — science, ethics, social re- 
form, political advance, — immediately follows. 
Moreover in many minds, — let it be frankly 
acknowledged, — the suggestion is not born of 
the spirit of compromise, but of dire necessity. 
The modern mind is really for Christianity — 
without miracle and without dogma ;^^ but so- 

^ Such is the contention of Mr. Matthew Arnold in 
his "Literature and Dogma." How attenuated Chris- 



28 The Christianity of Christ 

phisticated by the conception of the universality 
and uniformity of law, by the reign of causal- 
ity, and by the brilliant generalization that 
most men have agreed to style evolution, with- 
out raising further hard questions, it revolts 
fundamentally and almost instinctively at the 
notion of Incarnation — the living of the life of 
God within the limits of the life of even the 
wisest, purest, and most Godlike man. It is, 
therefore, not so much a proposal of compro- 
mise and surrender, a price to be paid for the 
allegiance of aliens, as it is a condition and de- 
mand created by the modern spirit, without 
which it seems to find itself unable to enter 
upon the path of religion. As such, we may 
sympathize with it. 



tianity becomes in the hands of this apostle of culture 
I need not stay to point out : in the hands of others 
(positivists, pantheists, agnostics, secularists) the thin 
thread of "the Power not ourselves that makes for 
righteousness" breaks in twain, and both ends, — the 
'"Power not ourselves" and the "righteousness" for our- 
selves, — are flung away. 



And His Apostles 29 

But let us reflect. Christianity without the 
Incarnation ceases to be reHgion. It surrenders 
its distinction. Jesus, however unique in the 
ethical realm, is no more a bond and mediator 
between God and man than Socrates, with 
whom he has been so often compared. Har- 
nack more than intimates that the discourse 
of Jesus, as set forth in Mark, Matthew, and 
Luke, was exclusively of the Father and never 
of himself. But this is a mistake: and the 
Ritschlians generally have been obliged to 
assign to Jesus the "value" of God. Here 
Loisy joins the issue most effectively with 
Harnack, and I very cordially side with the 
Catholic against the Lutheran. Whatever may 
or may not have been the apocalyptic elements 
that entered into Jesus' total conception of the 
Kingdom of God, in the Sermon on the Mount 
itself his own lordship in the Kingdom is di- 
rectly coupled with the rewards of obedience 
to the Father's will: "Not every one that 
saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into 



30 The Christianity of Christ 

the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth 
the will of my Father which is in heaven. 
Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, 
have we not prophesied in thy name? and in 
thy name have cast out devils? and in thy 
name done many wonderful works? And then 
will / profess unto them, / never knew you: 
depart from me, ye that work iniquity. "^^ And 
the great and decisive passage in Matthew and 
Luke is an indisputable and integral element of 
the synoptical tradition : "xA.ll things are deliv- 
ered unto me of my Father, and no man know- 
eth the Son but the Father: neither knoweth 
any man the Father save the Son, and he to 
whomsoever the Son will reveal him."^^ Upon 
this knowledge and power Jesus bases his direct 
invitation to the world to come (not to the 
Father but) to himself: ''Come unto me all ye 
that labor and are heavy laden, and / will give 
you rest. Take uiy yoke upon yon, and learn 

^Matt. vii. 21-23. 

'"' Matt. xi. 27 ; Luke x. 22. 



And His Apostles 31 

of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart : and 
ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke 
is easy, and my burden is light."^^ 

This conclusion is not merely theoretical. 
As has been intimated, it has the widest con- 
firmation of history, and, it may be added, of 
Christian experience. Every form and species 
of Unitarianism is felt to deprive Christianity 
of its worth and, as religion, is doomed. Christ 
has a divine place in his reHgion or (essential- 
ly) he has none. Unitarianism may be compre- 
hensible; it may be acceptable to the scientific 
spirit; as a simplification it may seem the bet- 
ter adapted to diffusion; we may even forgive 
the tortuous exegesis of professional theolo- 
gians like Wendt,^^ George Holley Gilbert,^^ 
and others who, in this interest, would exclude 
the preexistence from the sayings of Jesus re- 

•"' Matt. xi. 28-30. 

''^"•Teaching of Jesus," II. 168-178. 

"In his "Revelation of Jesus." 



32 The Christianity of Christ 

corded in the Gospel of John, or, what amounts 
to the same thing, reduce it to a purely ideal 
significance; but, when the last concession is 
made, the witness of the New Testament, of 
the Christian consciousness, and of history is 
uniform that without a Divine Christ his re- 
ligion is powerless and dead. It might sur- 
vive as ethics or as a programme of social 
progress; but the satisfaction of the scientific 
demand, thus conceived, is the denial of the re- 
ligious need; and Christianity is asked to sur- 
vive by a sacrifice that involves its death. 

That the redeeming love should come to man 
by way of the Cross is to-day, as from the be- 
ginning, another stone of stumbling. Theo- 
logically, it is thought to be inconsistent with 
the basal fact of the divine love on which I 
have insisted as the ultimate source of the 
Christian religion ; ethically, it is thought to in- 
volve a contradiction of our primary intuitions. 
Historically, it is sometimes hinted that the 
doctrine of Atonement is not older than An- 



And His Apostles 33 

selni,^* and owes much of its Protestant cur- 
rency to Grotius;^^ or that, so far as PauHne, 
it is only a juridical reflection of Roman law in 
the Christian firmament. 

Once more I may appeal to the New Testa- 
ment, to Christian consciousness, and to his- 
tory that a connection between the death of 
Christ and the forgiveness of sins is primitive 
and constant in the Christian religion. It is 
directly traceable to the lips of Jesus in the 
two great sayings of the Synoptical Gospels : 
"The Son of man came not to be ministered 
unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ran- 
som for many {^ovvat ryjv 4''^^yjv avrov ^1;- 
rpov dvrl no2.?.cdv) /'^^ and "This is my blood 
of the covenant which is shed for many unto 

^*"Cur Deus Homo?" finished at Capua in 1098. 

^"Defense of the Catholic Faith Concerning the 
Satisfaction of Christ Against Socinus," published in 
1617. 

^^Mark x. 45; Matt. xx. 28: "to liberate many from 
the miser}^ and penalty of their sins," Thayer, sub voce. 

3 



34 The Christianity of Christ 

' ? » -, t - \ JJ37 

remission oi sms {ei^ a<p£Giv af/.apTLuv). 
When we descend to the apostoHc circles we 
find the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, 
John, and Paul all committed to the use of the 
great words, DAGxeoBaij l/.aauoz, L/.aGry;pLOv: 
''Wherefore it behoved him in all things to be 
made like unto his brethren, that he might be a 
merciful and faithful high priest in things per- 
taining to God to make propitiation for the sins 
of the people ( eig ro l/AGxEcOai rd, auaprlag 
rov Xaor)";^' "And he is the propitiation for 
our sins ( £p.a(7//6g iarti' Ticpl rc5r auaprtuv 
Ti^uuv) ; and not for ours only, but also for 
the whole world (jiepl o/,ov rov xoauovY^ f^ 
"Herein is love, not that we loved God, but 
that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the pro- 
pitiation for our sins {xalaTieareu.evrovvlov 
avrov L/.aauov Tiepi ruv auapriuv r^uuv) ; 
"Whom God set forth to be a propitiation, 

"Matt. xxvi. 28. 

"Heb. ii. 17. "i John ii. 2. *i John iv. 10. 



And His Apostles 35 

through faith, by his blood ( ov npoeOeto 6 dsog 
l/iacrtTipiov Sia Ttlatsag iv red avtov al^art), 
to show his righteousness because of the pass- 
ing over of the sins done aforetime, in the for- 
bearance of God."*^ Thus on the widest in- 
duction of the several classes of the apos- 
tolic literature of the New Testament, we find 
a threefold witness to the reality of atone- 
ment by propitiatory sacrifice in the death of 
Christ. 

That the demand for atonement is consist- 
ent with the love of God is manifest when we 
regard the holy element in that love; and that 
the divine love provides the atonement is ex- 
pressly declared. ''Herein is love," to quote 
once more a pivotal passage, "not that we loved 
God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son the 

"^ Rom. iii. 25 : See Sanday's full discussion of this 
passage, "It is impossible to get rid, from this passage, 
of the double idea (i) of a sacrifice, (2) of a sacrifice 
which is propitiatory." — Com. on Romans, in Interna- 
tional Critical Commentary. 



36 The Christianity of Christ 

propitiation for our sins."' And Paul declares, 
''God commendeth his own love toward us, in 
that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died 
for us."^^ It is clear that there was no antece- 
dent indisposition in this divine love to forgive, 
else it could not have freely provided the nec- 
essary means to forgiveness. It is clear that 
the divine holiness interposed an obstacle to 
forgiveness, else the propitiatory sacrifice had 
been unnecessary,"*^ The atonement is thus at 
once the propitiation for sins and the measure- 
less revelation of the forgiving love of God. 
More than twenty years ago I printed an ex- 

'=Rom. V. 8. 

■" "The obstacle to forgiveness," says Dr. Stevens, 
"lies not In God's feelings, but in his essential right- 
eousness, which so conditions his grace that without its 
satisfaction he cannot in self-consistency forgive. In 
the heathen view expiation renders the gods willing to 
forgive; in the biblical view expiation enables God, 
consistently with his holiness, actually to do what he 
never was unwilling to do." 



And His Apostles ' 37 

po:sition of the doctrine of atonement^* which 
enters into details and combats objections. I 
have no disposition so much as to look into 
that earlier piece of work just now; though 
I abide by its conclusions and the grounds of 
them. It is enough to say, in this connection, 
that, as of the essence of Christianity, the 
atonement presents two aspects — toward God 
and for man. Toward God it is propitiatory; 
for man it is vicarious. Jesus in his death is 
man's substitute before God and the author 
of salvation by the remission of sins. The 
Scriptures have nothing to say, indeed, of com- 
mercial equivalence in penalty, an uncondi- 
tional exchange of so much for so much which 
is utterly foreign to the moral realm, nor of 
that other impossible human theory of ethical 
transfer of character. But rob the atonement 
of its propitiatory and vicarious character, and 
you degrade it to the level merely of a moral 

** "Methodist Doctrine of Atonement," in the Meth- 
odist Quarterly Review (New York) for April, 1884. 



3^ The Christiaiiity of Christ 

spectacle, — which, indeed, it is, subHmely ap- 
pealing and moving, — or of a governmental 
expedient, — which subordinately and conse- 
quentially it may be; but neither the moral 
spectacle nor the governmental expedient an- 
swers to the full and deep representation of the 
New Testament concerning the ground and de- 
mand and provision of atonement in God him- 
self ; nor is any view that omits the propitiatory 
and vicarious elements able to make the guilty 
conscience clean. ^^ 

The Spirit answers to the blood, 
And tells me I am born of God. 

That the earliest theme of apostolic preach- 
ing, by Peter"^*^ no less than by Paul,"*" v/as Jesus 

*'^ Perhaps the best of our recent treatises on the sub- 
ject is Dr. James Denney's "The Death of Christ." Dr. 
Eernhard Weiss in his just now (1905) published "Re- 
ligion of the New Testament" has some exceedingly 
valuable expositions of the pertinent scriptures. 

*'Acts ii 24-36; iii. 15, 21; iv. 2. 

*'Acts xiii. 30-37; xvii. 18: "because he preached 
Jesus and the resurrection." 



1 



And His Apostles 39 

and the resurrection does not admit of doubt. 
The resurrection was the tremendous event 
that reestablished the faith of the apostles and 
disciples, and clearly became the most vivid 
and the overshadowing and dominant fact in 
the consciousness of the Apostolic Church. It 
was a physical resurrection. The empty grave 
alone might not establish this fact; but the 
documents are uniform in placing the stress on 
the evidence of the senses and indisputable 
tests of bodily existence and sensible experi- 
ence — such as eating and drinking, and the 
correction or corroboration of sight by touch. 
"Him God raised up the third day," is Peter^s 
summary in the Acts of the experiences of the 
disciples with their Risen Lord, "and showed 
him openly, not to all the people, but unto wit- 
nesses chosen before of God, even to us who 
did eat and drink with him after he rose from 
the dead."*^ In the earliest summary of the 

*^Acts X. 40, 41. 



40 The Christianily of Christ 

evidence by Paul, "he was seen of Cephas, then 
of the twelve ; after that, he was seen of above 
five hundred brethren at once, of whom the 
greater part remain unto tliis present, but some 
are fallen asleep; after that, he was seen of 
James, then of all the apostles ; and last of all 
he was seen of me also, as of one born out of 
due time."^^ The details of the gospel narra- 
tives amply confirm these Petrine and Pauline 
summaries. "J^sus saith unto them, Come 
and dine. . . . Jesus then cometh and 
taketh bread and giveth them, and fish like- 
wise. ... So when they had dined, Jesus 
saith to Simon Peter,"^^ etc. "And they gave 
him a piece of a broiled fish and of an honey- 
comb, and he took it, and did eat before 
them."^^ "Behold my hands and my feet, that 
it is I myself: handle me and see; for a spirit 
hath not flesh and bones as ye see me have.""*- 
"11ien saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy 

^^i Cor. XV. 5-8. ^"Jolin xxi. 12-15. 
■^'Lnke xxiv. 42, 43. "Luke xxiv. 39. 



And His Apostles 41 

finger, and behold my hands ; and reach hither 
thy hand and thrust it into my side: and be 
not faithless, but believing."^^ And yet Jesus' 
own commendation is upon a mightier demon- 
stration than that of sense, "Blessed are 
they that have not seen, and yet have be- 
lieved."^* 

To this history must be added prophecy — on 
the lips of Jesus himself. These prophecies 
were of the obscurer as well as the plainer kind, 
and on that account possess with many critical 
minds the greater weight. "Destroy this tem- 
ple, and in three days I will raise it up"^^ is a 
sentence that (historical criticism warrants us 
in saying) undoubtedly fell from the lips of 

^^John XX. 27. "John xx. 29. 

^^ John ii. 19 ; c£. Matt. xxvi. 61 ; xxvii. 40 ; Mark 
xiv. 58; XV. 29, 30. John records the saying in the 
course of his history, but makes no mention of its use 
at the trial of Jesus ; while Mark and Matthew have no 
record of Jesus' use of the saying, but both mention its 
production as proof of blasphemy at the ecclesiastical 
trial of our Lord. 



4- The Christianity of Christ 

Jesus. "As Jonah was three days and three 
nights in the whale's belly ; so shall the Son of 
man be three days and three nights in the heart 
of the earth,"^^ is an equally indisputable say- 
ing in which a definitely limited but other- 
wise wholly indefinite interment, with no men- 
tion of either death or resurrection, is dwelt 
upon. 

St. Paul long since set forth the conse- 
quences of the denial of the resurrection of 
Jesus. "Now if Christ be preached that he 
rose from the dead, how say some among you 
that there is no resurrection of the dead ? But 
if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is 
not Christ risen. And if Christ be not risen, 
then is our preaching vain, and your faith is 
also vain. Yea, and we are found false wit- 
nesses of God ; because we have testified of God 
that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not 
up, if so be that the dead rise not. For if the 

^*':Matt. xii. 40. 



A}id His Apostles 43 

dead rise not, then is not Christ raised ; and, if 
Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are 
yet in yonr sins. Then they also which are 
fallen asleep in Christ are perished. If in this 
life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all 
men most miserable. But now is Christ risen 
from the dead, and become the first fruits of 
them that slept."^"^ These consequences follow 
as certainly to-day as when the apostle wrote. 
The resurrection gave life to Christianity; it 
sustains the life of the Church now; without 
it the religion of Jesus must perish. 

Historically, as we have seen, the resurrec- 
tion of Jesus is sufficiently attested. Even 
Keim, with all his indisposition to transcend 
the limits of historical and natural science as 
he conceives them, is obliged to conclude that, 
though "history can take cognizance only of the 
faith of the disciples that the Master was risen, 
and of the marvelous effect of this faith in the 

^'i Cor. XV. 12-20. 



44 '^'^^^ Christianity of Christ 

establishment of Christianity" ; yet ''in order 
to account for this faith of the disciples and its 
effect in conquering and renovating the world, 
we must suppose, contrary to the natural order 
to which science is confined, that God did not 
let what he had ordained end in death, or hand 
over the resurrection of Jesus to the uncertain 
play of subjective visions. "^''^ With his extra- 
natural and extra-scientific explanations we 
need not concern ourselves ; the facts are much 
more naturally accounted for by the physical 
resurrection. The tendencies to its denial even 
among some theologians of our day are the re- 
sult of the pressure of the modern spirit. But, 
if in Jesus God became incarnate, the resurrec- 
tion and ascension become his natural, if not 
necessary, exit from the earthly sphere, and 
this pressure is misdirected. The resurrec- 
tion is the direct continuation of the line which 
marks the character and activities of Jesus. 

■'■^'■Jesus of Nazareth," VI. 360-362. 



And His Apostles 45 

As an historical religion, therefore, Christian- 
ity includes this fact in its foundations. It is 
as the Hving and glorified Head of his Church 
that Jesus perpetuates his work. By one Spirit, 
proceeding from the Father and from the Son, 
are we all baptized into one Body. Sever the 
Head from the Body and the Body dies. The 
Church lives through her living Head, ''who 
ever lives to make intercession for us." 

For a moment, I may review the course 
along which we have come. Christianity is re- 
ligion, — communion with God mediated by 
Jesus Christ and sustained by his Spirit ; it has 
its source in the freely bestowed and freely 
bestowing love of God ; which, in turn, is a re- 
deeming activity exerted toward sinners, mani- 
fested in and measured by the Incarnation, the 
Atonement, and the Resurrection of Jesus 
Christ. So far the Gospel centers in the Per- 
son of Jesus, and what he was and did is more 
than what he taught beyond this sphere, all his 
ethics having their spring here both for him 



4^ The Christianity of Christ 

and for his disciples to the end of time. "Oth- 
er foundation can no man lay than that is laid, 
which is Jesus Christ."^^ It is a divinely laid 
foundation in the birth, the death, and the 
resurrection of Jesus Christ, to which no hu- 
man master builder can add, and from which 
he cannot take away. It is a real and objective 
foundation, unchangeable with the unchange- 
ableness of God, beyond the reach of Churches, 
councils, and theologians. The essentials of 
the Christian religion are embodied in its 
Founder. The attempt to remove any of them 
is to dismember Him.'^*' 

■ ■ I Cor. iii. II. 

'"On the great passage in i Cor. iii. ii, Meyer cor- 
rectly and decisively remarks : "The foundation already 
lying there, however, is not that which Paul had laid 
(as most interpreters, resting on verse lo; including dc 
Wette, Xeander, Maier, Hofmann) ; for his affirmation 
is universal, and if no one can lay another foundation 
than that which lies already there, Paul, of course, 
could not do so either, and therefore the keIuevo^ must 
have been m it? place before the apostle himself laid 



And His Apostles 47 

We may now pass to Jesus' life work as a 
Teacher and the Founder of the Kingdom of 
God. 

In a sense, we are now turning from the his- 
torical and the spiritual to present, practical, 
and concrete Christianity. We turn to the 
teaching of Jesus concerning the law of love as 

his foundation. Hence the Ksi/ievog de/ieT^cog is that laid 
by God (so, rightly, Riickert and Olshausen), namely, 
Jesus Christ himself, the fundamentum essentiale, he 
whom God sent, delivered up to death, raised again, 
and exalted, thereby making him to be for us wisdom 
and righteousness and sanctification and redemption. 
. . . This is the objective foundation, which lies there 
for the whole of Christendom. But this foundation is 
laid (v. 10) by the founder of a Church [as Paul], 
inasmuch as he makes Christ to be appropriated by 
believers, to be the contents of their conscious faith, 
and thereby establishes them in the character of a 
Christian Church." — H. A. W. Meyer, Commentary on 
First Corinthians in loco. Cf. Beet: "Christ is the 
foundation of the Church, objectively; inasmuch as 
upon his death and resurrection rest his people's faith 
and hope. He is so subjectively by his presence in them, 



4S , TJic Christianity of Christ 

the law of life, — a teaching v/liich is the direct 
consequence of the revelation of the love and 
Fatherhood of God. It is not necessary to es- 
tablish here by a critical inquiry the exact na- 
ture of the Kingdom of God.^^ The literature 
of the subject is voluminous and instructive, 
and is still increasing. Jesus clearly regarded 
himself both as the Founder of the Kingdom 
and as King within it. The Old Testament 
disj^ensation is preparatory, and even John 
the Baptist is external to the Kingdom.®' 
The Kingdom is, in general, the reign of 
God through his Son in holy love over the 
hearts and lives of men who accept the law of 

The rock on which wc stand is hoth beneath our feet 
and within our hearts. This foundation, laid objectively 
for the whole Church on the Great Facts, was laid 
subjectively in the hearts of the Christians at Corinth, 
as the firm ground of iheir personal hopes, by Paul." — 
Commentary on First Corinthians. 

*"See Bruce; and Orr, in Hastings's "Dictionary of 
the Bible." 

"Matt. xi. II. 



And His Apostles 49 

supreme love to him and of universal love to 
their kind. "The Kingdom of God is not 
meat and drink, but righteousness and 
peace and joy in the Holy Ghost," is the 
final conception and deposit in the Chris- 
tian consciousness as reflected in the PauHne 
Epistles. The Church, though falling far short 
of the ideal, may, for our present purpose, be 
accepted as its organized and visible form. It 
is one : its marks are the congregation of faith- 
ful men, the preaching of the pure word of 
God, and the two sacraments of Baptism and 
the Lord's Supper. AH the Churches, — if we 
accept the superficial plural, — contribute to the 
Kingdom and belong to it; and yet it is more 
than the sum of all the Churches. The redeem- 
ing activities which, humanly speaking, ema- 
nate from the Kingdom fall upon all men as 
potential sons of God and citizens of his realm. 
The divine administration as directed toward 
wicked and rebellious children, — who are still 
children in the divine regard, — is for their 
4 



TJic Chrisiiauily of Christ 



reclamation and salvation. Jesus laid down 
the golden rule and the law of love as the neces- 
sary legislation of the Kingdom ; and St. John 
adds to his declaration of the divine love 
(''Herein is love, not that we loved God, but 
that he loved us, and sent his Son the pro- 
pitiation for our sins") the deduced injunc- 
tion, "Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought 
also to love one another."^^ More briefly: 
''We love, because he first loved us."^* The 
motive of the love we ought to bear one 
another is not found in the worthiness of 
the object, even as this is not the source and 
spring of the di\'ine love ; but in the undeserved 
goodness of God in the gift of his Son for 
us and for all men, notwithstanding their 
and our unworthiness. Once more the vital 
place and practical value of the Incarnation in 
Christianity become apparent. Moreover, the 
Fatherhood of God is the original truth, from 

'"'i John iv. TO. ir. "'[ Jolm iv. lo, R. / '. 



And His Apostles 51 

which is derived the brotherhood of man; a 
brotherhood established through the relation 
of the children to a common Father. And 
what is the world, both within and with- 
out the Church, more in need of to-day than 
the reduction of the law of love to practice 
and the everyday and matter-of-course rec- 
ognition of the brotherhood of men? Let us 
notice .some applications of the law of the 
Kingdom. 

There is the urgent problem of capital and 
labor. Are not the basal laws of political econ- 
omy confessedly the expression and outgrowth 
and, when consciously followed, the organiza- 
tion of the principle of self-interest, which, on 
the merely human plane, is regarded as legiti- 
mately and necessarily controlling ? Under the 
law of supply and demand, does not the capi- 
talist go into the open market to buy labor as 
he goes to buy material ? Does he not seek to 
purchase flesh and blood on the same terms and 
according to the same conditions on which he 



52 The Christianity of Christ 

purchases lumber or bricks or stone ? I am not 
asking, Is he cruel in his feelings or purposes? 
In the view of economics, simply, Is not the 
price of labor regulated as a matter of course 
by the law of supply and demand ? Is the num- 
ber of the children in the workman's family, 
or only the number of other workmen clam- 
orous to do the given work for the same or 
lower wages, the decisive element in estimating 
compensation for labor? On the other hand. 
Does the workmen's union consider the human 
suffering entailed by the prolonged and general 
strike, or only its effect on the advancement of 
wages? I need not tarry to give formal an- 
swers to such a list of questions. It is clear 
that if the antagonisms of capital and labor are 
ever to be permanently reconciled, it must be 
through the bringing in of a higher law than 
that which rules the commercial world. The 
economic world cannot be divorced from the 
Christian. In a word, the reconciliation must 
come because both capitalist and laborer are 



And His Apostles 53 

made members of the Kingdom of God and ob- 
serve the law of the brotherhood. Nothing else 
can regulate human greed, on the one hand, or 
human envy and withholding of that which is 
meet, on the other. The Kingdom of God is 
not sociological in the ordinary sense; but it 
brings in the law and the better hope of an- 
other society of which Jesus Christ is the Head, 
and this law becomes effective as the individual 
capitalist or laborer becomes a citizen of the 
Kingdom of God. The Kingdom is not of this 
world because its law transcends and trans- 
forms the laws of human society; but it is of 
this world by the very function and fact of 
this transformation. Economics and sociology, 
pure and simple, need a supplement which is 
supplied by the law of love in the Kingdom of 
God. If it be objected that such a supplement 
is commercially chimerical and impossible, — 
after the manner of the usual coarse and blind 
criticisms on the precepts of the Sermon on the 
Mount, — the answer js at hand. If the law of 



54 T^hc Christianity of Christ 

love is not thus capable of practical and general 
introduction into the affairs of men, then Jesus 
was a mistaken enthusiast in his announcement 
of this supreme and universal demand, and the 
Kingdom of God is a city in cloudland. But, 
to my mind, the correct reading of the Gospel 
of Jesus Christ gives every man the most prac- 
tical measure of his Christianity, and the most 
legible warrant of his citizenship in the King- 
dom, in the degree of the operation of the law 
of love in his life.^^ 

A favorite specific prescribed by the social 
reformers is the shortening of the hours of 
labor. Shorten them by all means. If seven 
or eight hours of manual labor a day will sus- 
tain the laborer's family at its present stage of 
comfort at least, society or commerce ought 
not to exact ten. But some reformers seem to 
have been sadly disappointed that the emanci- 
pated laborer does not always devote his two 

"°See Dr. C. A. Briggs's "The Ethical Teaching of 
Jesus." 



And His Apostles 55 

or three hours of leisure to the reading of good 
books in the "library" which he is supposed to 
have made haste to accumulate, or to his gen- 
eral moral and religious improvement. Though 
the notions of such men as Bishop Potter con- 
cerning the necessary functions of the saloon 
as the "poor man's club" fall but little short of 
outright diabolism, it is nevertheless true that 
thousands of workmen with their shortened 
time will employ their newly acquired leisure 
over their beer-mug and pipe rather than over 
books and religious newspapers. 

Let these shortened hours stand as repre- 
sentative of all else that it is proposed to give 
the laborer — better wages, better houses, better 
food. Let it be granted at once that these im- 
proved conditions will give many a man a 
chance for his life — his intellectual and spirit- 
ual life as well as his physical. Let it be 
granted that Christians owe it to their Lord 
and to themselves, as well as to the underpaid 
laborer and the "submerged tenth," to afford 



56 The Christianity of Christ 

these better conditions. There is no question, 
indeed, of the duty of the Church and of so- 
ciety. But, to save unthinking sociological en- 
thusiasm from sore disappointment, it may be 
asked, In the light of experience and our knowl- 
edge of human nature, what results are to be 
reasonably expected from these changes? Are 
the social reformers preaching a sane, sober, 
true, whole gospel when they lead us to antici- 
pate the general redemption of society through 
the adoption of these measures ? 

All of these changes may be summed up in 
the ambitious language of the books on sociol- 
ogy as "transformation of environment." By 
a transformed environment it is thought that 
society may be regenerated en masse. I fear 
not. On Fifth Avenue the increased income 
and leisure lead often only to the substitution 
of the bottle of champagne for the bottle of 
beer ; of the grand ballroom of the very rich for 
the low dance-hall of the very poor; of gilded 
and elegant lust, which reaches its end if need 



And His Apostles 57 

be through the divorce court, for the foul de- 
bauchery of the dive and the slum. The gospel 
of regeneration through a new environment, — 
unless the new environment is wide enough to 
include the Kingdom of God and all its saving 
forces, — is evidently a defective and misleading, 
— I do not say false, — gospel. A transformed 
environment is often needed for both the very 
rich and the very poor to prepare the way for 
the Gospel of Christ. Jesus probably thought 
it more necessary for the former than for the 
latter. But, in either case, he who thinks that 
a change of environment secures a change of 
heart is vastly mistaken. At the extremes of 
society we have two environments which, with 
the exception that the men and women who 
move in them are human beings, have scarcely 
an element in common. Yet it might be a very 
nice question which of these extremes stands 
most in need of the redemption provided in 
Christ. The lusts of human nature are com- 
mon to both wings, and differ only in the de- 



$8 TJie Christianity of Clirist 

cency and scale of their gratification. As inti- 
mated above, Jesus doubtless thought the case 
of the rich sinner more desperate than that of 
the poor. Let the Christian sociologist go be- 
fore as the John the Baptist of the Gospel of 
Jesus the Christ. Particularly, let both wings 
of society be reached by enlisting the very rich 
in the service of the very poor. Let us not be 
discouraged if numbers of the very rich refuse 
to be enlisted, and if numbers of the very poor 
refuse to be helped. No problem is more deli- 
cate and difficult than that of helping the help- 
less, whether rich or poor. It is visionary to 
believe that we shall ever be able to bring the 
whole face of society to a common level, eco- 
nomical and financial, or moral and religious. 
Meantime, the gospel of love and service is of 
supreme obligation, and must dictate the life 
and control the energies and resources of all 
who profess and call themselves Christians. 
We that are strong ought to bear the infirmities 
of the weak, even to the extent of bearing the 



And His Apostles 59 



infirmities of him who is weak by his own fault 
and sin. But transformation of environment 
will not solve the whole problem : otir gospel 
must include not only the transformation of the 
environment, but the transformation, the reor- 
ganization, the regeneration of the human be- 
ings who move in the midst of it. 

Here in America, and more especially in the 
South, the race problem is always with us. 
Are we expecting the legislators at the state 
capitals, or the congressmen at Washington, to 
solve it ? Is not the political world, like that of 
economics, confessedly ruled by the law of hu- 
man self-interest and advancement? Is there 
any hope for the solution of such a problem by 
political machinery, except as the agents who 
control the machinery and the populations that 
are controlled are members of the Kingdom of 
God? And what is this but declaring once 
more that the reduction of the law of love to 
practice is the Christian and only solution of 
the race problem? Granted that the negro is 



Oo TJic Christianity of Christ 

often ignorant, brutal, savage. ^^ Granted that 
his too frequent record of unmentionable crime 
is horrible and revolting. If all were a thou- 
sand-fold worse than it is, the law of the broth- 
erhood of the Kingdom is all the more mani- 
festly the only sufficient remedy. For the duty 
to discharge all the offices of love, let us recall, 
does not rest on the worthiness of the object, 
but on the free, undeserved love of God in 
Christ Jesus alike to us and to the negro. If 
St. Paul were writing to-day, he might ask, 
"Is God the God of white men only? Is he 
not also of the negroes?'' and he would answer, 
''Yes, of the negroes also." And in that an- 
swer would be wrapped up the Christian dy- 
namic of love that should dissipate racial ha- 
treds and variances and solve racial problems 
of whatsoever nature. 

'■"Though we are prone to overlook his astounding 
progress — as an owner of realty and a payer of taxes, 
as a farmer, merchant, manufacturer, and professional 
m.an ; progress, educationally, morally, religiously. 



i 



And His Apostles 6i 

The Church is committed by her Lord to the 
work of foreign missions — to the Umit of 
world-wide evangeHzation. And much of the 
professed disbehef in foreign missions is hol- 
low and selfish and avaricious, even when the 
disbelievers essay to justify themselves by the 
needs of the home field. Nevertheless, If we 
love not the negro whom we have seen, how 
shall we love the Chinaman whom we have not 
seen ? Is not the negro the wounded, bleeding, 
half-dead Jew lying helpless and naked in the 
road that leads from every Southern door, to 
whom he among us who would acquire the 
neighborly character of the Good Samaritan 
must minister ? Can any assiduous devotion to 
the distant needy one absolve us from the duty 
of ministration, according to the ability which 
God giveth, to this desperately needy one who 
is just at hand? 

But I must draw toward a conclusion. Rome 
has annexed to her conciliar definitions the 
anathema sit: let him be anathema — that un- 



62 2^ he Christianity of Christ 

fortunate one who believes not the foregoing 
ecclesiastically defined dogma. The Pauline 
and Protestant anathema is, "If any man preach 
any other gospel unto you than that ye have 
received, let him be anathema,"^^ or, 'Tf any 
man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be 
anathema : Maranatha."*^^ Jesus himself said, 
"Whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be 
broken : but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will 
grind him to powder."^^ It is the divinely fixed 
and unchangeable elements of the living Gos- 
pel, preachable and preached for the salvation 
of the world, as they center in the historical 
Jesus, the Incarnate, Atoning, and Risen Sav- 
iour, altogether lovely and lovable, which, if 
man reject, he, by his irresponsiveness to the 
last manifestation of love, advertises his worth- 
lessness and irredeemableness and his fitness 
for the refuse heap of God. It is Christianity 

°'Gal. i. Q. •''^'i Cor. xvi. 22. 
•'"Matt. xxi. 44; Luke xx. 18. 



And His Apostles 6^ 

as religion that saves ; without it the soul dies. 
That the Gospel, notwithstanding the outstand- 
ing characteristics of modern mind and Hfe 
that we have been considering, is in this new 
century renewing its youth and giving promise 
of universal and permanent conquest, as of the 
Absolute Religion, few open-eyed observers 
will deny. Christians, — the one Church and 
family of God in the earth, — are recognizing 
the law of love as binding them all together 
and as binding the Body of Christ to the world 
of mankind; Christian missions are covering 
the earth as the waters cover the sea ; Christian 
philanthropy is the noblest and most conspic- 
uous mark of our times. That the twentieth 
century will witness developments of the Chris- 
tian religion with which only those of the first 
will be comparable, one ventures little in proph- 
esying. Christ is King to-day in a sense and 
with a breadth of which flaming apocalyptists 
scarcely dared to dream; and perhaps the new 
century shall 



64 The Christianity of Christ 

Bring forth the royal diadem, 
And crown him Lord of all. 

And now the task I set out to do in this 
initial study is done. In meager outHne I have 
sought to exhibit the essential characteristics 
of the Christian religion. Its Origin has been 
sought in the love of God; its Means in the 
redemption which is in Christ Jesus, through 
his Incarnation, his Atonement, and his Resur- 
rection; its End in the founding of the King- 
dom of God and the binding of men to God 
and one another by the law of love. "Thy 
kingdom come" must be the prayer and labor 
of the Church, for it is the hope of the world 
lying in the wicked one. All the selfishness 
and antagonisms of men are to be lost in the 
Kingdom which ruleth over all. 

I may close with a repetition of the definition 
which alone seems to me to do justice to all the 
elements of the Christian religion, none of 
which may be omitted witliout fatal injury: 

Christianity is the religion of God's redeem- 



And His Apostles 65 

ing love, manifested in the Incarnate life, the 
Atoning death, and the glorious Resurrection 
of Jesus Christ, the Founder of the Kingdom 
of God, whose citizens are become sons of God 
by the power of his Spirit, and brothers of all 
mankind. 
5 



II 

THE VOCATION OF JESUS THE 
PROOF OF HIS GODHEAD 



THE VOCATION OF JESUS THE 
PROOF OF HIS GODHEAD^ 

"My meat," said Jesus, ''is to do the will 
of him that sent me, and to finish his work."^ 

^I am conscious that this chapter could not have been 
written without the perusal of Albrecht Ritschl's "Justi- 
fication and Reconciliation." I have had before me a 
page of notes made just after the book was read about 
four years ago. But I am unable to make detailed ref- 
erences without again reading a large volume, into 
which I have not had leisure so much as to glance. I 
shall hope that, as reflecting my own convictions stated 
in my own way, the essay is not the worse for that. 
While there are elements of the Ritschlian theology that 
are to be decisively rejected, I am confident that the 
judgment of those who regard Ritschl as the greatest 
and most influential German theologian since Schleier- 
macher is correct. He is destined, I think, to an increas- 
ing influence in America, and, discriminatingly used, is 
capable, with Kaftan, of rendering the largest service to 
evangelical orthodoxy. — J. J. T. 

7ohn iv. 34. 

(69) 



70 The Christianity of Christ 

Though occurring in the Fourth Gospel, this 
is a saying of the Lord's that bears the mint- 
"mark of his coinage as indisputably as the 
most luminous of the self-attesting sayings of 
the Synoptical Gospels. It passes current 
without question or suspicion even among 
the hostile critics of the Gospel in which it 
occurs, as having the exact and full value of 
the mind of Christ. It was evidently stere- 
otyped from his lips; for the record in which 
it appears is evidence sufficient that, so far 
were those who heard it from being equal to 
its Invention, that they were quite incapable 
of understanding it after it was spoken into 
their ears. Its inimitable originality betrays 
its source and stamps its parentage to the end 
of time. AMiether we look upon it as a tele- 
scopic or as a microscopic text, — as bringing 
nigh the great which is very far off, or as mak- 
ing large and discernible the delicate and ob- 
scure that Is just at hand, — It Is the deepest 
disclosure of the fountains of our Lord's life. 



And His Apostles *ji 

We have all seen in the Roman churches the 
pictures of the "bleeding heart" of Jesus. 
Garments and flesh are torn aside, and the 
quivering heart, from which the blood drops 
are falling, is exposed impaled upon the spear 
point. Not this hideous daub of the meaner 
sanctuaries, nor the masterpiece of the great 
cathedrals, affords the true insight into the 
interior depths of Christ's life. Rather he 
himself deliberately puts the veil aside and 
invites the adoring gaze of his disciples when 
he says, "My meat is to do the will of him 
that sent me." From the psychological point 
of view, these words open up our Lord's life 
to its innermost core. The setting, with all 
the wealth of delicate and natural detail that 
marked the interview with the woman of 
Samaria, is evidently historical. The errand 
of those who went away into the city to buy 
meat and who, on their return, obtusely asked, 
"Hath any man brought him aught to eat?" 
is the last circumstance that makes inevitable 



/- 



TJic Christianity of Christ 



the saying itself and our belief of it as a word 
from the mouth of Jesus. Its force and com- 
pass entitle it to be used as the key to unlock 
the sacred secret of the person and life of 
Jesus. 

What does it mean ? 

I. It cannot mean less than this, that the 
consciously and deliberately chosen, and stead- 
ily pursued, personal end and purpose of Je- 
sus sensed him for satisfaction and sustenance. 
To do the will of him that sent him proved 
to be his soul's meat, the solid satisfaction of 
his soul's need, the one food that answered 
the ultimate demands of his nature. 

I. How did this doing of the will of an- 
other meet the deepest needs of Jesus' own 
soul? In a threefold way. 

(i) It was a response, of course, to the 
demands of his own nature; it was the devel- 
opment of his own gift. Even skeptical in- 
vestigators like \\'ernle recognize in Jesus 
what they are pleased to denominate a super- 



And His Apostles 73 

human consciousness. That there were very- 
extraordinary elements in that consciousness - 
the most casual reader of the Gospels must 
recognize. The scientific method demands 
that we begin by taking full and exact account 
of these elements. It is outraged when the 
claims of Jesus are set aside without taking 
account of his mind and his work. From 
this unique consciousness of Jesus, according- 
ly, we may take our point of departure. 

Jesus was true to God because he was true 
to himself, and did not, while obeying a will 
consciously other than his own and divine, 
substitute for his own conscious nature, gift, 
and call something alien to them. What Je- 
sus was and did was primarily of himself and 
as himself; otherwise the development and 
course of his life become unreality and mock- 
ery. There are forms of statement of the 
Anselmic doctrine of atonement which lend 
countenance to the view that Jesus could stand 
in the place of another only because he had 



74 ^^it* Christianity of Christ 

no p05t of his own to occupy. There is a 
point of view in which that is, no doubt, pro- 
foundly true. But, for my present purpose, 
it must also be made evident that the pecul- 
iarity of Jesus' consciousness was that it ap- 
pointed for him a path so unique that he alone 
could walk in it. Dut}', in general, is of the 
higher to the lower: of the Maker and Mas- 
ter to the creature and servant. What the 
latter can render is only a meed of sen.-ice in 
recognition of a debt of gratitude already in- 
curred. But original and absolute duty is of 
the Superior to the inferior, apart from the 
character and conduct of the latter. Xow Je- 
sus found his consciousness possessed of this 
peculiar quality- of absolute duty, penetrating 
his soul to its depths, and dominating from 
first to last the activities of his life. The pe- 
culiarit}' of this self -consciousness of Jesus, 
as we may gather from almost ever}' page of 
the Gospels, was that while it was native, per- 
sonal, original, and gathered the true law of 



4 



And His Apostles 75 

its active expression from within, it was at 
the same time identical with the will of God, 
objectively imposed and recognized as such. 

(2) Thus, though in the fullest sense spring- 
ing from the deepest wells of his selfhood, 
it was not selfish, for this unique personal end 
and purpose found its satisfaction, — still per- 
sonal, if one insist upon it, — in an absolute 
and unvarying devotion to the welfare of oth- 
ers. ''He that saveth his life shall lose it, and 
he that loseth his life shall save it," was an 
axiom of the ethical and religious life born 
of Jesus' crystalline knowledge of his own 
soul and the laws of its healthful and sinless 
activity. This rule of life-saving which Jesus 
lays down so unwaveringly for the observance 
of his disciples was tested to the uttermost in 
his own experience. In this the Master was 
not better than his disciples; it was enough 
for Jesus that he be as his disciples. Initial 
victories were v/on in the temptations of the 
wilderness; the final, at Gethsemane and Gal- 



7^ The Christiaiiify of Christ 

vary; but the law was formulated in the ex- 
perience of Christ long before these final crises. 
If at the last, when the price of loyalty to the 
law of his selfhood, which was at the same 
time devotion to his kind and, as will be noted 
explicitly, unqualified submission to God, was 
the sacrifice of his life, there was a momentary 
faltering in the Garden or on the Cross, that 
faltering was but momentary, and the selfhood 
of Jesus followed the law of its absolute de- 
velopment in a final sacrifice of self for the 
highest good of the race of which he was a 
member. 

(3) The native law of his selfhood not only 
demanded complete devotion to the good of 
his kind but found itself identical with the 
execution of the plan and purpose of God. 
This was the third moment in the satisfying 
sustenance of him whose meat was eminently 
"to do the will of him that sent him, and to 
finish his work." That ''man shall live by 
every word that proceedeth out of the mouth 



And His Apostles 77 

of God,"^ Jesus had adopted as the law of his 
life at the very beginning of his ministry; 
"Nevertheless, not my will but thine be done"* 
was the word of acceptance of the Father's will 
in the Garden; and "the prince of this world 
Cometh and hath nothing in me"^ was the 
final verdict of his consciousness as he went 
forth to betrayal and crucifixion. 

(i) The law of his own self-development; 
(2) the law of absolute devotion to the wel- 
fare of humanity; and (3) the law of complete 
abandonment and committal to the will of 
God: these three were completely one law in 
the inmost nature of Jesus dictating and con- 
trolling his purpose and plan. 

2. It is hardly necessary to point out that 
this triple-stranded single law of Jesus' nature 
applies equally to Doing and Suffering as parts 



'Matt. iv. 4 ; Luke iv. 4 ; Deut. viii. 3. 

*Luke xxii. 42; Matt. xxvi. 39, 42, 44; Mark xiv. 36. 

''John xiv. 30. 



The Christianity of Christ 



of his One Obedience. Indeed, suffering as 
accepted and ethically satisfying and helpful is 
itself, in a sense, actiTc. As dumb submission 
to the inevitable it has no moral value, and is 
sometimes illustrated even in the case of the 
lower animals. Mental suffering as mere 
weakness, tending toward and degenerating 
into disease, is ethically indifferent. It may 
be simple breaking down and surrender in the 
presence of the tasks that are refused and set 
aside because of their assumed incommensura- 
bility with our resources and strength. Then 
it becomes morally culpable. None of these 
characteristics attached to the suffering of Je- 
sus. It was an active entrance into the sor- 
rows of the world and a positive acceptance 
of the burdens of humanity. It was the delib- 
erate asstmiption of the office of universal Sin- 
bearer. Xo man took his life from him. He 
laid it down of himself. If it be not profana- 
tion to liken the highest human suffering to 
that of him who trod the winepress alone, — in 



And His Apostles 79 

a majestic solitude of suffering to which there 
is no human approach or parallel, — then Wash- 
ington, as he marked the bloody footprints of 
his men in the snows of Valley Forge and yet 
held them to the work of the Revolution ; then 
General Lee, as he moved among the retreat- 
ing regiments from Gettysburg, saying, ''Boys, 
it was all my fault," and assuming a blame that 
did not belong to him ; then sad-eyed and sad- 
hearted President Lincoln, as he wrote words 
of immortal consolation to that Massachusetts 
mother who had given five sons to die for their 
country; then these, and such as these, may 
know some measure of the active exercise 
of that vicarious suffering which in the Su- 
preme Person of history wrought the redemp- 
tion of the world. Vicarious suffering, so far 
from being the blot, is the glory of the moral 
realm. Its superlative exercise in Jesus is a 
true mark of his deity. It is the outermost 
rim of his life, encircling and binding together 
its manifold activities, as these are offered 



So TJie CJiristianiiy of Christ 

unto God uix)n the altar of humanity, redeemed 
and sanctified by his blood. 

3. The outward crown and completion of 
the law of Christ's life is found in prayer, 
which was for him meat since it was the feed- 
ing of his soul on the will of God. The writer 
of the Epistle to the Hebrews has correctly 
seized the secret. Jesus, in the days of his 
flesh, when he had offered up prayers and 
supplications with strong crying and tears unto 
him that was able to save him from death, 
"zvas Jieard/'^ His Father heard and an- 
swered with an unmistakable revelation of his 
will, with which that of his Son came into 
immediate accord. Prayer was for Jesus the 
active outgoing of his soul in its highest and 
best, and always finally victorious, moods to 
discover the will of God, to penetrate and, as 
it were, to analyze it to the last limit, that he 
might arouse and reenforce and feed his own 

•■'Heb. V. 7. 



And His Apostles 8i 

will by the realized and vivid perception of 
its identity with the Father's. To this end, 
he hesitated not, if need be, to spend the whole 
night in prayer, as before the choosing of the 
Twelve, upon whose ministry hung the final 
establishment of the Kingdom of God. So 
far is this exercise of prayer from being, as 
alleged by Wernle and others, the proof of 
our Lord's pure and dependent humanity, — 
though, on one side, it has its lessons here, too, 
— that it becomes the exalted and active union 
with God which attests the divine heights on 
which our Lord dwelt above the plane of mere 
manhood and affords the best illustration of 
the purity and depth of that unique conscious- 
ness which was in him. In this he is the 
Apostle and High Priest of our profession, 
and continues to this day the exercise of his 
incommunicable mediatorial office. Here lie 
the characteristics which constitute him the 
Representative and the Redeemer of men. 
In all the foregoing we may see the equip- 



Tlic Christianity of Christ 



ment of the One Intercessor; thus are we led 
to 

II. The Isolation and Uniqueness of Christ's 
Vocation. 

In a twofold sense the isolation and unique- 
ness of Christ's vocation now become apparent : 
( I ) he did not share it with any other messen- 
ger of God however exalted, as IMoses or Eli- 
jah^ (2) it was a vocation for him supreme 
and solitary, so that he was incapable of divid- 
ing it with any other calling, coordinated with 
it or subordinated to it. Coordination is in 
itself impossible; subordination, intolerable. 

I. The preceding discussion has shown the 
exalted and unsharable uniqueness of the mind 
of Christ in its consciousness of union with 
God and of the identity of its native ends with 
the plans and purposes of God. So far as we 
can penetrate from the side of human psychol- 
ogy, as we endeavor to gather up in a formula 
of psychical law the phenomena of the con- 
sciousness of lesus manifested in the events 



^ 



And His Apostles 8^ 

and sayings recorded in the Gospels, this pe- 
culiar experience of union with God, and of 
identity of purpose with him, is of the es- 
sence of the personality of the God-man in 
whom the divine and human natures were 
joined together in an indissoluble copartner- 
ship. There were two wills, but between 
them complete harmony reigned, — nay, abso- 
lute identity subsisted; this harmony and iden- 
tity freely proceeding from the human side 
in its essential and native impulses and ends, 
and from the divine side in the imposition 
and penetration of the law of an absolute 
purpose and plan of God that encountered 
no obstacle or hindrance in the perfect will of 
Jesus. 

2. But the uniqueness of Christ's vocation 
appears also in the exclusion of all other ends. 

Ordinary men, and even men of genius, may 
have their (i) domestic, (2) social or civil, 
(3) professional, and (4) artistic or scientific, 
vocation. These may be but ever enlarging 



84 The Christianity of Christ 

spheres for the broadest reahzation of the all 
but infinite riches with which even our finite 
human personality is dowered. And when all 
are entered into, the conscious possibilities of 
the person remain unexhausted. 

(i) It is the ordinary duty of men to as- 
sume the responsibilities of family life. He 
who refuses the obligations of husband and 
father generally condemns his own nature to 
a stunted and one-sided development. God 
hath set the solitary in the family, and only 
in the blessed companionships of that circle 
is the perfection of normal character ordinari- 
ly possible. This is the law ordained of God. 

(2) Similarly, one must enter into all the 
duties of citizenship and assume the several 
relations, and consequent obligations, that 
arise out of the complex organization of mod- 
ern society. None can be evaded without 
guilt. One's best judgment and influence, ac- 
cording to the measure of his ability and of 
that station in Hfe wherein it has pleased God 



Ajid His Apostles 85 

to call him to this service, must be given to 
the conduct of the affairs of government, lo- 
cal and economical, and general and political. 
The Christian, in particular, according to the 
precepts of the gospel, must always be the 
duty-doing and exemplary citizen, rendering 
unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's. Only 
whtn the exactions of Caesar carry with them 
the impossibility of rendering to God the 
things that are God's does the law of exemp- 
tion from the lower, through loyalty and de- 
votion to the higher, come into play. 

(3) Commonly there must be added per- 
sonal devotion to a specific professional or 
commercial or manufacturing or agricultural 
calling. No man, with a sound mind in a 
sound body, can guiltlessly be an idler in the 
vineyard of this busy world. He who will not 
work must not eat. He has no right to im- 
pose his maintenance as a tax upon the ener- 
gies and resources of his fellows. 

(4) Beyond all these spheres of domestic, 



o6 The Christianity of Christ 

social, and business life may lie devotion to 
science and art (though, in special instances, 
exclusive devotion to these by the professional 
artist or scientist may move this sphere of 
activity up into coincidence with the third). 
Both the artistic and the scientific interest and 
activity answer to legitimate developments of 
human faculty; they lie nearest to the gener- 
ality and disinterestedness of religion itself, 
and often afford a field for all noble human 
endeavor short of the noblest. They are not 
to be excluded from the life plan of the normal 
man who seeks to make the most of himself, 
and by making the most of himself to be worth 
most to his kind. 

But when we examine the record of Christ's 
activities, we find that he deliberately exclud- 
ed and refused all these spheres of development 
and usefulness, — a plan of life that could be 
excused and explained only by the superiority 
and dominant exclusiveness of his unique pur- 
pose and end. 



And His Apostles 87 

(i) Christ accepted no domestic vocation. 
He speedily detached himself from the family 
into which he was born without founding a 
family of his own. The whole Romish con- 
ception of the influence of the Virgin with her 
Son, and of her controlling position as the 
"queen of heaven," is belied by the express 
•representations of the Gospels, and by the 
unique consciousness of Jesus which united 
him with God rather than with his human 
mother. 

(2) Our Lord peremptorily refused a civil 
vocation, as reformer, economist, or judge. He 
was neither a socialist nor a labor leader, as 
some of the recent superficial interpreters of 
the gospel would lead us to esteem the carpen- 
ter of Nazareth, as he is assumed to have been. 
Such narrowing of his aim was incompatible 
with the depth and universality of his con- 
sciously pursued personal purpose and end. 
As a meliorist, every specific alleviation of the 
ills of humanity v/as included in the ultimate 



88 The Christianity of Christ 

results of his work; but the universal and 
eternal significance of that work could not be 
sacrificed to the temporary role of a social or 
political emancipator in Palestine or the Ro- 
man Empire. Jesus, though he announced 
the principles that carried in them the doom 
and extinction of human slavery throughout 
the earth, had not one word to say about the 
evils of the slavery that honeycombed the Ro- 
man Empire in his day. He would not be 
the divider of estates between quarreling and 
covetous litigants, though announcing every 
day the laws of the universal brotherhood 
which he came to establish. As statesman, or 
warrior, or social emancipator and reorganizer, 
for his own people or a wider commonwealth, 
he doubtless might have accomplished much. 
It does not require much delving beneath the 
surface of the Gospels to discover that a real 
temptation for Jesus lay in this direction. But, 
had he yielded, he could not have been the 
Saviour of the world. Sinking himself into 



And His Apostles 89 

the common categories, he would have sacri- 
ficed the unique and divine ends of his mission. 
(3) He did not engage himself in systemat- 
ic fashion with the sacred learning of the Jews 
— like Paul. It is now the fashion to assign 
to Paul (as Wernle does) the credit of the 
universalization of Christianity. I would not 
seek to detract from his merit. He was pos- 
sibly the greatest man that ever lived; but no 
one knew better than he that his Master was 
more than man. He had problems of infinitely 
perplexing detail to solve ; he had the most in- 
veterate prejudices of human nature to over- 
come, first in himself and afterwards in his co- 
laborers or their professed disciples; but there 
is not an epistle of Paul's that does not show 
that this scholar was utterly incapable of 
founding Christianity. He was capable of 
understanding and propagating it, indeed, as 
few of his own time or since have understood 
and preached it. But founding it is quite a 
different thing. It is not overly difficult to 



90 The Christianify of Christ 

construct from data furnished by Paul him- 
self the picture of what his Kfe would have 
been without Christ. A Pharisaic legalist of 
unusual sincerity and strictness, a doctor of 
the law. a greater Gamaliel serving his people 
with fidelity and zeal. — these are the rough 
outlines whose details one need not stay to 
fill in. 

(4) Christ was no apostle of art or of 
science. Great and beneficent as is such an 
apostleship, its noblest exemplars would con- 
fess the inferiority- of themselves and their 
work to the Christ and his mission. Yet there 
are not lacking those who rise up to lament 
the absence of aesthetic and scientific elements 
from the gospel that Christ preached, and to 
condemn the provincial barbarism that ex- 
cluded such high aims from the sphere of his 
acti\-ities. As if the sense of the beautiful, of 
which he who saw more loveliness in the lily 
of the field than in the royal array of Solo- 
mon was certainlv not devoid, could deflect 



And His Apostles 91 

this sensitive soul filled with sympathy for 
human suffering and sin from his task as Re- 
deemer of men! As if the perfecting of 
knowledge were comparable with the great 
deliverance which he came to work out and 
proclaim! As if there were not a heavy in-, 
dictment lying against the mere aestheticism 
and culture of the day because of its indiffer- 
ence to the moral ideal and its insensibility to 
the needs of suffering men! 

Thus I may reach, in explicit and final 
statement, 

III. The Unique Vocation of Jesus the 
Proof of his Godhead. 

I. It was, first of all, such a proof, or in- 
ward demonstration and conviction, for him- 
self. His unique consciousness and gift fixed 
the plane and type of his temptations. No 
inward experiences of Jesus were more real, 
or entered more intimately into the depths of 
his consciousness, than these conflicts, whose 
actual occurrence is the only warrant or ex- 



92 Tlic Christianity of Christ 

planation of their incorporation in the narra- 
tives of the Gospels. When we read, ^'he was 
tempted in all points like as we are," it is im- 
possible to conceive that Jesus, perfect physical 
man though he was, had any real temptation 
in the direction of sensuality. Whatever mere- 
ly theoretical possibilities must be allowed, to 
guard his absolute freedom and his perfect man- 
hood, the trials that assailed him arose from a 
totally different quarter. As a human being, his 
temptations lay in determining the career that 
was demanded by the unique elements of his 
consciousness. And here, it may be added, the 
struggle of his human faculties did not arise 
from a lack of harmony with the Father's will, 
consciously apprehended and dissented from, 
but from the necessity that the man, who 
passed through all the stages from an infantile 
to a mature consciousness, should discover and 
penetrate the Father's will, and should fix him- 
self upon the certainties of his own course, 
prescribed and determined alike by the divine 



I 



And His Apostles 93 

revelation and by the uniqueness of his own 
personal gift and call. It was necessary that 
Jesus should come into possession of himself; 
and by so much as the elements of his per- 
sonality were complex and unparalleled was 
the decision as to his actual course difficult. 
Here, as I conceive, lay the secret of the fast- 
ing and temptation in the wilderness, of the 
nights of lonely, wrestling prayer in the desert 
or on the mountain, of the prayers and strug- 
gle in the Garden. He discovered unique ele- 
ments in his consciousness from the moment 
of his maturity — say, from the time of the visit 
to the temple at the age of twelve; but the 
interpretation of these inward deliverances, 
and the decisions as to the exact conduct de- 
manded by them at the several crises of his 
life, constitute the well-defined field of the pro- 
bation of Jesus of Nazareth. The most uni- 
versal of the three temptations in the wilder- 
ness, and, according to St. Matthew, the last 
of the three, was the vision of "all the king- 



Tl:: Christianity of Christ 



doms of the world and the glon* of them";' 
from which Jesus turned aside to begin the 
epoch-making and world-shaking proclama- 
tion, "the Kingdom of heaven is at hand."^ 
Thus, 

2. As Founder of the Rule or Kingdom of 
God. Christ's purpose and plan were from the 
beginning superhiiman, transcending the sphere 
of all earthly dominion and mere kingly con- 
quest. As deliberately undertaking the found- 
ing of the Kingdom of God among men, 
Christ's personal end and purpose were identi- 
cal with God's, not only in quality, but in 
scope and extent. Xo other servant of the Al- 
mighty had ever dared to proclaim his mis- 
sion to be to carry the work of God through 
completely to a perfect accomplishment, — 
reXftfocro) is the verb employed in John iv. 34. 
This testimony of Jesus in his initial preach- 
ing becomes indeed the deepest spirit of the 



'Matt. iv. 8. 'Malt. iv. 17. 



And His Apostles 95 

prophecy: "His name shall be called Wonder- 
ful, Counsellor, the mighty God, the everlast- 
ing Father, the Prince of Peace : of the in- 
crease of his government and peace there shall 
be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon 
his kingdom to order it, and to establish it 
with judgment and with justice from hence- 
forth even forever."^ 

The new Kingdom was spiritual, — an em- 
pire, first of all, over the hearts and lives of 
individual men, — universal, and unending. It 
could not be measured by any political power 
or glory, however unparalleled. The Papacy at 
its best estate, under its Gregories and Inno- 
cents and Bonifaces, could not contain it; the 
combined ecclesiasticisms of to-day cannot 
mark its boundaries. Historically, Christen- 
dom, expanding from the band of Jerusalem 
disciples that chose the successor to Judas to 
the Church Universal and the Christian insti- 

"Isa. ix. 6, 7. 



9^ Tlic CJiristianity of Christ 

tutions of the league of Christian States to-day, 
is the partial and still incomplete exposition and 
vindication of the Christ's choice and purpose. 
If prophecies and gospel records alike raised 
questions of some obscure Jewish writings 
alone, then the flippant Renan and the ration- 
alistic Strauss and the agnostic Spencer, and 
their like, might be entitled to their say. But 
in so far as History, as the sphere of the free, 
is superior to Science, as the sphere of the 
fixed ; in so far as reason and conscience, ethics 
and religion, as Huxley himself began to sus- 
pect, afford the distinctive theater of that which 
is properly and exclusively human, and conse- 
quently the high point of humanity's contact 
with the divine and of God's revelation of him- 
self to man, — just so far does it become evi- 
dent that the nineteen Christian centuries, 
which illustrate the vocation and achievements 
of Jesus of Nazareth, attest the unity and 
identity of his plan and purpose with those of 
God himself. And it doth not yet appear what 



And His Apostles 97 

Christendom, — the reign of Christ so far as 
visible, — shall become, extensively and inten- 
sively, in the earth. Beyond the earthly limits, 
human thought falters and fails when the ef- 
fort is made to conceive what the Kingdom 
shall be when Christ shall have put down all 
rule and all authority and power, and "shall 
have delivered up the Kingdom to God, even 
the Father." Such conceptions of St. Paul's 
concerning the ultimate destination of the 
Kingdom (apart from all theories of inspira- 
tion) are certainly entitled to outweigh the 
modern speculations, about which there is not 
space or need to dispute here, and to determine 
the true interpretation of the apocalyptic ele- 
ments, which, on the surface, the teaching of 
Jesus exhibits. 

3. Even in the Synoptical Gospels, and in 
the oldest and most authentic elements of 
them, Christ is represented as the Bearer of 
God's Revelation and Sovereignty. Here the 
classical passages are Matt. xi. 25-30 and Luke 
7 



9^ Tl:: Christianity of Christ 

X. 21-24. Of the pivotal verse, l>.latt. xi. 2j, 
Luke X. 22, Dr. Sanday says : 

'This passage is one of the best authenti- 
cated in the S}-noptic Gospels. It is found in 
[nearly] exact parallelism both in St. Matthew 
and St. Luke; and is therefore known to have 
been part of that 'collection of discourses' 
(cf. Holtzmann, Syiiopt. Evangelicn, p. 184; 
Ewald, Evangelien, pp. 20, 225 ; \\'eizsacker, 
pp. 166-169) in all probability the composition 
of the Apostle St. IMatthew, which many critics 
believe to be the oldest of all the evangelical 
documents. And yet once grant the authentic- 
ity of this passage, and there is nothing in the 
Johannean Christolog}' that it does not cover. 
Even the doctrine of preexistence seems to be 
impHcitly contained in it."^** 

In short, its genuineness is indisputable. It 
is like "an aerolite from the lohannean heav- 



^The Authorship and Historical Character of the 
Fourth Gospel/' p. 109. 



And His Apostles 99 

en," says Hase; and ''for that reason," adds 
Plummer, who cites these words of Hase's, 
"causes perplexity to those who deny the sol- 
idarity between the Johannean heaven and the 
Synoptic earth. "^^ Keim calls it ''the pearl of 
the sayings of Jesus." 

In Matthew, the passage, properly arranged 
as a single paragraph in the Revised Versions, 
both the English and the American Standard, 
reads : 

"At that season Jesus answered and said, I 
thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and 
earth, that thou didst hide these things from 
the wise and understanding, and didst reveal 
them untO' babes : yea. Father, for so it was 
well-pleasing in thy sight. All things have 
been delivered unto me of my Father: and no 
man knoweth the Son, save the Father ; neither 
doth any know the Father, save the Son, and 



"Commentary on Luke, p. 282; Hase, "Geschichte 
Jesu," p. 527. 



loo The Chris fiamiy of Christ 

he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal 
him. Come unto me, all ye that labor and are 
heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take 
my yoke upon you, and learn of me: for I 
am meek and lowly in heart : and ye shall find 
rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, 
and my burden is light."^^ 

In Luke, the complete paragraph reads : 
"In that same hour he rejoiced in the Holy 
Spirit, and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord 
of heaven and earth, that thou didst hide these 
things from the wise and understanding, and 
didst reveal them unto babes : yea, Father ; for 
so it was well-pleasing in thy sight. All 
things have been delivered unto me of my Fa- 
ther : and no one knoweth who the Son is, save 
the Father; and who the Father is, save the 
Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to 
reveal him. And turning to the disciples, he 
said privately. Blessed are the eyes which see 

"Matt. xi. 25-30. 



And His Apostles loi 

the things that ye see : for I say unto you that 
many prophets and kings desired to see the 
things which ye see, and saw them not; and to 
hear the things which ye hear, and heard them 
not."^^ 

In Luke the passage has a most natural and 
vivid historical setting in immediate connec- 
tion with the return of the Seventy, though in 
both Matthew and Luke it is associated with 
the denunciation of the three cities, Chorazin, 
Bethsaida, and Capernaum. "The Seventy re- 
turned with joy," and the Master said, "In 
this rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto 
you; but rejoice that your names are written in 
heaven,"^* i. e., "that ye are destined by God," 
says Meyer, "to be in the future participators 
in the eternal Messianic life." In that very 
hour Jesus also exulted {rfyaXkidaaro) , His 
own divine exaltation of joy is closely and ex- 
pressly connected with the return and rejoicing 

^^Luke X. 21-24, both Revisions. 
"Luke X. 17-20. 



I02 The Christianity of Christ 

of the Seven:;,-. According to the reading of 
the Sinaitic and \'atican fourth century manu- 
scripts and of other uncials, which have de- 
termined the text translated in our Revised 
Versions, this rejoicing was "in the Holy Spir- 
it." That is, the ecstatic and exultant state of 
Jesus was recognized as the consequence of an 
immediate indwelling and inspiration by the 
Spirit of God. In the success of the mis- 
sion of the Seventy. Jesus had "beheld Satan 
fallen as lightning from heaven." In this hour 
of assured triumph of the Kingdom, and of 
the competence of the human agents through 
whom the prince and power of darkness must 
be overthrown, Jesus and the Seventy enjoyed 
a baptism of mighty joy, which, in the case of 
Jesus, at least, was directly due to his posses- 
sion of the Spirit of God. Nothing distantly 
resembling this is recorded of Jesus anywhere 
else in the Gospels. It might almost be con- 
sidered the crisis of his Spiritual Transfigura- 
tion, of which his Bodily Transfiguration was 



And His Apostles 103 

the adumbration and symbol. In that moment 
of supreme exultation, Jesus burst forth, "I 
make public acknowledgment of thy glory, I 
give thee praise (e^ofioXoyovfiai) , O Father, 
Lord of heaven and earth." It is in his char- 
acter as Universal Sovereign that the Father 
is here addressed by his Son. "All things," 
Jesus declares, "have been delivered unto me 
of my Father" : not simply the potestas reve- 
landi, though the connection suggests this as 
a primary reference. He announces himself as 
the Bearer of the perfect revelation of God and 
of the Divine Sovereignty in all things per- 
taining to the establishment and welfare of 
the Kingdom. ^^ 

""It is quite as unwarrantable to limit Trdvra in any 
way whatever, as it is to take Tzaped.odrj as referring to 
the revelation of the doctrine (Grotius, Kuinoel, and 
others), or to the representation of the highest spiritual 
truths (Keim), which Christ is supposed to have been 
appointed to communicate to mankind. It is not even 
to be restricted to all human souls (Gess). What 
Jesus indicates and has in view is the full power with 



^^4 Tlie ChrisfiaJiiiy of Christ 

Moreover, he speaks out of the richness and 
fulhiess of a superhuman and divine conscious- 
ness whose contents he is well aware are be- 
yond all natural human ken, and open only to 
the eye of God : "no one knoweth who the Son 
is, save the Father: and who the Father is, 
save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son 
willeth to reveal him." The passage asserts 
a complete mutual knowledge, from which all 
others are excluded, of the nature, thought, 
counsel, action, purpose, and end of the Father 
by the Son, and of the Son by the Father/® 

which, in sending him forth, the Father is understood 
to have invested the Son, a power to dispose of every- 
thing so as to promote the object for which he came. 
Jesus speaks thus in the consciousness of the universal 
authority (xxviii. i8; Heb. ii. 8) conferred upon him, 
from which nothing is excluded (John xiii. 3, xvi. 15) ; 
for he means to say, that between him and the Father 
there exists such a relation that no one knows the Son, 
and so on." — Meyer, Commentary on Matthew, Ameri- 
can ed., p. 23 T. 

"Where Luke has yivuaKei r/f eanv 6 vide, Matthew 
has ETTiyivioaKEL ruv v\6v. Matthew's compound verb an- 



And His Apostles 105 

In Luke, this profound fact and truth and 
its consequences, visible even in the time of 
our Lord and his apostles, are represented as 
the secret hidden from the prophets and kings 
of the old dispensation; in Matthew the uni- 
versal invitation of the Gospel is directly based 
on the completeness of this mutual knowledge 
of the Father and the Son and the identity of 
their nature, purposes, and ends: ''Come unto 
me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and 
I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, 
and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in 
heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. 
For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." 

4. Thus as the Founder of the Kingdom of 
God and the sole Bearer of the perfect Revela- 
tion of the Father and of that Father's Sov- 
ereignty, Jesus is the one Ambassador of heav- 
en, the Son and heir as distinguished from all 

swers to Luke's rig. "Both," remarks Plummer, Com- 
mentary in loco, "might be translations of the same 
Aramaic." 



io6 The Christianity of Christ 

other sen-ants, in whom God makes manifest 
and effective in a wholly adequate, unique, and 
original way his own eternal end and purpose 
of love toward all mankind. The fabric of the 
whole mediatorial activity of Jesus, in life and 
death, in resurrection and ascension, in his 
session at the right hand of the Majesty on 
high, in all that he was, taught, and did, con- 
stitutes the medium and material of God's per- 
fect revelation of himself. Consequently Jesus 
could say, "He that hath seen me hath seen the 
Father,"^' and "I and my Father are one.''^^ 
Hence, in a word, his Godhead affords the sole 
possible ground and explanation of his voca- 
tion and work as the Revealer of God and the 
Fotmder of the eternal divine Kingdom; and 
"all men should honor the Son even as they 
honor the Father.""-' 

^•Joiin xiv. y; x:i. 45. "John x. 30. "John v. 23. 



1^ 



Ill 

THE FOUNDATION OF CHRISTEN- 
DOM 






i 

i 



THE FOUNDATION OF CHRISTEN- 
DOM 

When one reads the first chapter of First 
Thessalonians, he is probably perusing the first 
page of the New Testament that was commit- 
ted to writing. There may be materials in the 
Synoptical Gospels that assumed written form 
at an earlier date, but no one of our Gospels in 
its present shape is as old as this first letter 
from the pen of the Apostle Paul. Written, 
say, within twenty years of the close of our 
Lord's ministry and earthly life, First Thes- 
salonians associates Jesus with God. The 
Church of the Thessalonians is ''in God the 
Father and the Lord Jesus Christ."^ The first 
sentence after the salutation mentions the Per- 
sons of the Trinity, if I may here by anticipa- 
tion use the language of later ecclesiastical 

'i Thess. i. i. 

(109) 



no The Chnstiamty of Christ 

dogma, on this wise, "We give thanks to God 
always for you all, making mention of you 
in our prayers ; remembering without ceasing 
your work of faith, and labor of love, and pa- 
tience of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ, in the 
sight of God and our Father; knowing, breth- 
ren beloved, your election of God, how that 
our gospel came not unto you in word only, 
but also in power, and in the Holy Ghost, and 
in much assurance."" The apostle describes 
the Thessalonian Christians as "imitators of 
us, and of the Lord, having received the word 
in much affliction, with joy of the Holy 
Ghost. "^ In the final verses of this short chap- 
ter, the elements of the gospel. — the word of 
the Lord that sounded out in ^Macedonia and 
Achaia and through the Roman Empire, — are 
epitomized. The Thessalonians "turned to 
God from idols to serve the living and true 
God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, 
whom he raised from the dead, even Jesus, 

'i Thess. i. 2-5. 'i Thess. i. 6. 



And His Apostles m 

who delivers us from the wrath to come."* 
If we analyze these passages never so briefly 
and superficially, we find that God is so easily 
and naturally spoken of as "the Father" and 
"our Father," that the teaching of Jesus con- 
cerning the Fatherhood of God is historically 
presupposed, prior in time to the writing of 
this Thessalonian letter, though later reduced 
to writing in the Gospels we have. The Fa- 
therhood was of the essence of St. Paul's 
preaching, though he was not one of the 
Twelve, and was a commonplace of the gos- 
pel received among the Thessalonians. The mis- 
sion of the Holy Ghost, and the power, joy, 
and assurance which he brings to all Christians, 
are appealed to, also, as a common experience 
and possession of the Church, and Jesus is al- 
ready "the Lord Jesus Christ," in whom, with 
the Father, the Church exists. On the final 
passage cited (verses 9, 10) Harnack makes a 
more impressive comment than any I can give : 

*i Thc6s. i. 9, 10. 



112 1 he Christianity of CJirist 

''Here we have the mission preaching to 
pagans in a nutshell. The 'living and true 
God' is the first and final thing; the second is 
Jesus, the Son of God, the judge, who se- 
cures us against the wrath to come, and is 
therefore 'Jesus, the Lord.' To the living 
God, who is now made known, we owe faith 
and devoted service; to God's Son as Lord, 
our due is faith and hope. 

"The contents of this brief message, — ob- 
jective and subjective, positive and negative, — 
are inexhaustible. Yet the message itself is 
thoroughly compact and complete. It is ob- 
jective and positive as the message of the only 
God, who is spiritual, omnipresent, omniscient, 
omnipotent, the Creator of heaven and earth, 
the Lord and Father of men, and the great 
disposer of human history; furthermore, it is 
the message which tells of Jesus Christ, the 
Son of God, who came from heaven, made 
known the Father, died for sins, rose, sent the 
Spirit hither, and from his seat at God's right 



And His Apostles 113 

hand will return for the judgment; finally, it 
is the message of salvation brought by Jesus 
the Saviour, that is, freedom from the tyranny 
of demons, sin, and death, together with the 
gift of life eternal. 

"Then it is objective and negative, inas- 
much as it announces the vanity of all other 
gods, and forms a protest against idols of gold 
and silver and wood, as well as against blind 
fate and atheism. 

"Finally, it is subjective, as it declares the 
uselessness of all sacrifice, all temples, and all 
worship of man's devising, and opposes to 
these the worship of God in spirit and in truth, 
assurance of faith, holiness and self-control, 
love and brotherliness, and lastly the solid 
certainty of the resurrection and of life eternal, 
implying the futility of a present life which 
lies exposed to future judgment/'^ 

""The Expansion of Christianity in the First Three 
Centuries," I. 108-110. Jiilicher, "Introduction to the 
New Testament," p. 46, also attaches importance to this 
8 



114 T^^^^ Cliristianity of Christ 

Any one enjoying a tolerable acquaintance 
with the earliest Christian Apologists knows 
how largely this theism of Christianity bulked 
in the earliest sub-apostolic presentation and 
defense of the gospel. For the course pursued 
there was ample apostolic precedent. If some- 
times we are disposed to wonder at the meager- 
ness of the post-apostolic Christian message, 
we must remember the stupidity and darkness 
and superstition of that heathen world into 
which the gospel was introduced and through 
which it moved with such enlightening pow- 
er.® Though he had forerunners, not only 

passage as indicating the contents of Paul's missionary 
preaching and his manner of "speaking to an audience 
of Gentiles who had never heard the name of Christ be- 
fore, and to whom he had first to explain the funda- 
mental religious ideas of repentance, of faith in the one 
true God, of the Resurrection and the Day of Judg- 
ment." 

"'Perhaps the most needful preparation for appre- 
ciating the beliefs of the early Church is to get rid of 
the assumption or impression that the post-apostolic 



And His Apostles 115 

like St. Stephen, but humble Christian men 
and women whose very names have perished 
who carried the gospel all the way to Rome, 
and colleagues, like Barnabas and Silas and 
Timothy, it is the everlasting greatness and 
glory of the Apostle Paul that he systemat- 
ically undertook and successfully accomplished 
the transplanting of Christianity from Pales- 
tine to the Roman Empire. "Hereby alone 
Paul proves himself to be the foremost inter- 
Church started with the fullness of the apostolic teaching 
as that is embodied, for instance, in the New Testament. 
That is a natural assumption, and it is often made without 
a thought ; but it is entirely opposed to facts. What the 
apostles and some others of their generation taught is 
one thing; what the Church proved able to receive is 
quite another. The tradition of the apostolic ministry- 
was vivid; the writings embodying its message, which 
we still possess, were circulating, and they were soon 
collected and set apart as a special deposit. But the 
Church, which had a glowing sense of the worth of 
Christianity, had as yet laid but feeble and partial hold 
on its treasures of wisdom and knowledge. — Robert 
Rainy, "The Ancient Catholic Church," pp. 66, 67. 



ii6 The Christianity of Christ 

preter of Jesus," says Wernle, though he is 
pleased to add, ''in spite of his deviations from 
the message of the Twelve."^ With true his- 
toric insight, he later adds, ''the communities 
in which the Spirit finds a habitation are des- 
tined to alter the current of the world's his- 
tory.'" 

The general contrast between the Gospels 
and the Epistles has been often pointed out, 
and is easily recognized by the general reader. 
The Gospels, — at least the first three, — are filled 
with the accounts of the deeds and teachings 
of Jesus. Miracles, parables, and discourses of 
wider compass and more general content, may 
fairly be said to constitute the substance of 
the Synoptists' narrative. Little place is given 
to the Person of Jesus, to his preexistence, in- 
carnation, and divinity. There is no systemat- 
ic exposition of the meaning of his death or of 
the need or significance of atonement. If the 

'"Beginnings of Christianity," I. 178. 
'Ihid., I. 191. 



And His Apostles 117 

resurrection is an exception, it is because it lies 
so obviously — so conspicuously — in the region 
of history and fact, where its place must first 
be made good before it can be utilized in the 
doctrinal system of the first interpreters of 
Jesus. In the Gospels the noble ethics of Je- 
sus are expounded and illustrated, as in the 
Sermon on the Mount ; the disciples are taught 
the spirit, and even a form, of prayer ; the lav;^, 
even if by quotation, is summarized in two 
matchlessly comprehensive commandments ; the 
golden rule is stated; and life in general is 
brought under the immediate inspection and 
guidance O'f the Father, apparently without 
emphasis on the mediation of the Son. When 
we turn to the Epistles, all this is changed. 
The paucity of the portrayal of the life and 
teachings of Jesus in the Epistles of Paul has 
often been remarked upon. His Christology 
and his knowledge of the personal words and 
works of Jesus seem to be in inverse propor- 
tion. It is true that sometimes the deepest and 



ii8 The Christianity of Christ 

most systematic and explicit Christological 
doctrines are introduced in a very familiar way 
and subordinated to practical ends, as when 
the great Philippian passage^ opens with the 
exhortation, ''Let this mind be in you which 
was also in Christ Jesus." But, in general, it 
may be said that preexistence, deity, incarna- 
tion, sacrificial death, justification or the for- 
giveness of sins, sanctification, the resurrec- 
tion of Jesus, his enthronement and return to 
judgment, constitute parts of a closely articu- 
lated doctrinal system, in which little place is 
found for the precepts and parables of the 
Gospels. It is usual to trace the greater part 
of this system, and sometimes the whole of it, 
to the experience of Paul at his conversion on 
the way to Damascus, with all the legalistic 
struggles that preceded it and the deliverance 
and peace that followed it. About the most 
extreme presentation of this general position, — 

Thil. ii. 5-II. 



And His Apostles 119 

whose strength does not need to be exaggera- 
ted, — that I have recently encountered is found 
in the words of Wernle, of whose historic con- 
jure* it is a stock trick to represent falsehood 
as mightier than the truth. "Jesus was pre- 
sented to the Greeks in the shape of a myth- 
ical drama," he says. "Once again they had 
a new myth, and that, too, derived from the 
immediate present. And this conquered the 
world." Indeed! It is surely open to ques- 
tion whether the man who could fling off such 
a careless statement is entitled to recognition 
either as historian or as thcoloHan. He adds : 
"The simple teaching of Jesus of Nazareth 
had never been able thus to win its way to 
victory, for the world was not yet ripe to re- 
ceive the impression of a great personality by 
itself. That which was great and redemptive 
in Jesus had to suffer itself to be wTapped up 
in the heavy coverings of dogma ; even in St. 
Paul it lives and works mightily therein. In 
spite of all, it must be deemed fortunate that 



I20 The Clirisfiam'ty of Christ 

Jesus was preached to the world by St. 
Paul."^' 

Such paradoxes of the failure and death of 
truth unless it assumes the guise and armor of 
falsehood, in which alone it becomes conqueror 
and heir of the world, can hardly masquerade 
in the light of modern knowledge as final his- 
torical verdicts. It is really pitiful how often 
Wernle indulges in this little piece of fanciful 
sophistry, and how uniformly he finds the 
transformation of truth into falsehood to be 
''fortunate" for the gospel or the indispensable 
condition of its survival. ^^ Satan himself 

•""Beginnings of Christianity,"' I. 254. 

"I append a few examples. "Jesus the Redeemer, not 
the lawgiver, that was his [St. Paul's] watchword. It 
was a great piece of good fortune for Christianity. As 
a mere teacher of true religion Jesus would only have 
taken his place in the ranks of the Greek moral phi- 
losophers by the side of Socrates or Pythagoras. As 
such he would doubtless have commanded respect and 
admiration, but never the faith which gives birth to a 
religion. Paul saved Christianity from the fate of stag- 



And His Apostles 121 

must have been the providence who so uni- 
formly at the great crises brought forward 
falsehood to serve the ends of truth. 

nation as a school of ethics in the universal Greek ra- 
tionalism." ("Beginnings," I. 176, 177.) It is seldom 
that one reads anything so shallow as this in what pur- 
ports to be history. Here are a few more supremely 
fortunate Pauline falsehoods. 'The consequence of this 
[Pauline rabbinical use of the Old Testament] is that 
the Old Testament and its God are saved; the God of 
Jesus Christ is also the God of Abraham. In a later 
age the whole assault of the gnostics beat in vain against 
this rock of apologetics. And thus even this artificial 
proof from Scripture turned out to be a piece of good 
fortune for the Church." (Ibid., I. 309.) "In St. Paul's 
controversies with Jews and Judaizers, the great ideas 
of moral liberty and of sonship to God are striving for 
a clear utterance. They fail to find an outer form such 
as to insure their victory; nevertheless it was fortunate 
for the whole future history of Christianity that they 
were connected so closely with its origin." (Ibid., I. 
313.) "It is perfectly incredible within how short a 
time the Jesus of history had to undergo this radical 
transformation" into the Christ of dogma; yet "it is for 
this living and loving Jesus that the apostle's high 



The Christianity of Christ 



But the general truth of this contrast be- 
tween the earher and the later parts of the Xew 
Testament must be accepted. \A*e must al- 
ways remember, however, that the Gospels, 
though holding the first position in our ar- 
rangement of the canon, and depicting events 
earlier than those recorded in the Epistles, are 
really of later composition, and issued from 
the bosom of that Apostolic Church to which 
Paul and Apollos and Cephas had already been 
given and which was in daily enjoyment of 
that living experience which the Epistles de- 
scribe. The greatest gift of the Apostolic 
Church to the Christianity of all time to the 

Christolog}- paves a way into the world.'' {Ibid., I. 
339.) Did falsehood ever play a nobler part in the 
history of humanity and of religion? Finally (I. 340), 
"Christianity only became a great spiritual power in 
the world through the theolog>- of St. Paul." Yet this 
theolog\-, — in its cosmology-, Christolog>-, and eschatol- 
ogy, — was nothing but an effete Jewish mythology ! 
Surely paradox and absurdit>- can proceed to no greater 
lengths. 



i 



And His Apostles 123 

end of the world is the Gospels. That there 
is no trace of later times discernible on the 
broad face of our Gospels no competent critic 
will assert. That the historical figure of Je- 
sus, and a true and objective record of his 
teachings, have been preserved, sober criticism 
may assert and successfully defend in the face 
of all the world/^ This is the achievement of 
the Apostolic Church. Pfleiderer, Wernle, and 

"So Jiilicher, despite the freedom, not to say license, 
of his criticism: "The Synoptic Gospels are of price- 
less value, not only as books of religious edification, 
but also as authorities for the history of Jesus. . , . 
The true merit of the Synoptists is that, in spite of all 
the poetic touches they employ, they did not repaint, 
but only handed on, the Christ of history." — "Introduc- 
tion to N. T.," p. 371. "It sounds paradoxical to say so, 
but the history of the Synoptic tradition stretches back 
to the very lifetime of Jesus. Within a short time after 
the appearance of the Messiah, certain particularly 
striking words of his were spread abroad in ever-widen- 
ing circles, while the fame of his miracles penetrated 
through the length and breadth of the Jewish lands." — 
Ibid., p. 374. 



124 ^^^^ Christianity of Christ 

their kind, may indulge their childish prattle 
about "myths" to their hearts' content; others 
may talk of the lack of the scientific historical 
sense in that age of the world. The truth re- 
mains. Urged on by some sense of solemn re- 
sponsibility to distant lands and unborn gen- 
erations which perhaps they themselves could 
not analyze or fully understand; bent solely, 
amid all their limitations and disabilities born 
of the age in which they lived, upon getting 
the truth about the words and deeds of Jesus 
on record, — that humble reformed publican 
whose life had been redeemed by the might of 
Jesus, remembered his old facility with the 
pen when he sat at the receipt of custom, and 
began his collection of the discourses — the 
"logia" — of Jesus ;^^ that companion of St. Pe- 

""Papias tells us that the Apostle ]\Iatthew inau- 
gurated this period of writing down (of course in the 
popular dialect of Palestine) a collection of Sayings of 
the Lord. . . . We do not doubt the statement of 
Papias, and it is to the eternal credit of the primitive 



And His Apostles 125 

ter's who had listened again and again to the 
substance of his missionary preaching be- 
thought himself to make that primary state- 
ment of "the beginning of the gospel of Jesus 
Christ, the Son of God," which survives to 
this day in St. Mark as the oldest of our Gos- 
pels; that companion of St. Paul's, who had 

community that it preserved to the Church the Jesus 
of history, as well as the Christ of the believer's re- 
flection. We know nothing definite as to the motives 
which induced this apostle to take up his pen, but it can 
only have been when the number of ear-witnesses of the 
words of Jesus had considerably diminished, and the 
need arose of handing on the substance of his Gospel, 
under the authority of an eye-witness and in permanent 
form (i e., in writing) to a rising generation who had 
neither heard nor seen the Lord. . , . How opportune 
was the undertaking of Matthew was proved by its suc- 
cess; even in the Greek communities it was soon felt 
to be indispensable, and preachers interpreted it as well 
as they could until good written translations did away 
with the necessity of such separate efforts, and at last 
supplanted the Aramaic original altogether." — Jiilicher, 
"Introduction to N. T.," pp. 378, 379. 



126 The Christianity of Christ 

the instincts if not the habits of an historian, 
used the work of ]\Iark and of ]\Iatthew and 
of all others of whose trustworthiness and 
value he could satisfy himself; and, lastly, as 
I believe will be finally demonstrated by con- 
vincing internal and external testimonies, the 
aged Apostle John wrote with his own hand, 
out of the fullness of his personal knowledge, 
the unique and incomparable Gospel which 
bears his name. But, apart from all the crit- 
ical inquiries which may be started, and have 
been started, in connection with the Fourth 
Gospel, the Synoptical Gospels stand as the 
monumental contribution of the general Apos- 
tolic Church to the historical foundations of 
Christianity. The Church of the Apostles gave 
birth to these Gospels, and if, without the 
guidance of the canons of historical research 
or the rules of modern historical composition, 
that Church produced records so manifestly 
objective and truth-telling, the general result 
mav be set down to the credit of an absolute 



And His Apostles 127 

loyalty to Jesus, of an unflinching fidelity to 
fact, and of the guidance and inspiration of 
the Spirit of God. 

But, before proceeding to a general expo- 
sition of the causes of the acknowledged con- 
trast between the Gospels and the Epistles, I 
desire to put in two pleas in abatement when 
the narrowness and simple historical narration 
of the Gospels are set over against the uni- 
versalism and doctrinal contents of the Epis- 
tles. One of these pleas is based on the con- 
tents of the Gospels, the other on those of the 
Epistles. Both may be exhibited in a brief 
analysis and summary. 

I. The universal destination of the gospel 
and the divine self-consciousness of Jesus may 
be collected with certainty, if from relatively 
few, yet from indisputably genuine, sayings 
of record in the first three Gospels. The 
whole question at issue may be said to turn 
here. If this point be made out, then the 
short and easy method of mythologists like 



128 The Christianity of Christ 

Pfleiderer^* and Wernle, the latter of whom 
does not hesitate to say that the Gospel of 
John is a mere writing back into the history 
of the purely dogmatic and apocalyptic and 
mythical Christology of Paul, is cut up by the 
roots. It is set aside as a mere conjecture 
of unbelieving criticism, which is not sup- 
ported by direct and convincing historical evi- 
dence, but simply commends itself to the crit- 
ical faculty as an hypothesis certainly broad 
enough to explain the facts, if it he assumed 
that Jesus himself did not evince his posses- 
sion of a divine self-consciousness and did 
not preach a gospel of universal significance. 
But, if an impartial examination of the 
Synoptical Gospels, in the light of the se- 
verest critical judgments, establishes the di- 
vine self-consciousness of Jesus and the 
universal destination of the gospel as he 



"'The Early Christian Conception of Christ." See 
review of this book in Appendix. 



And His Apostles 129 

preached it, the position of Wernle and Pfleid- 
erer and many others not only becomes un- 
tenable but is rendered superfluous and im- 
pertinent. In such a life-and-death struggle, 
involving a hand-to-hand conflict with the 
forces of unbelief as they have intrenched 
themselves in the works of professedly Chris- 
tian theologians, it may be necessary for the 
time to seem to abandon the outposts and to 
fall back upon the central impregnable citadels 
of defense. Thus we all know that our pres- 
ent Gospel of Matthew is not identical with 
the original collection of Hebrew or Aramaic 
discourses made by the apostle. The capable 
investigators of the Synoptical problem are 
practically unanimous in the conclusion that 
the narrative sections of our present Matthew 
are mainly dependent on Mark, while Luke, 
with the exception of one great section pe- 
culiar to himself, largely derives his parables 
and speeches from the same (or a similar) 
collection originally made by Matthew and 
9 



130 The Christianity of Christ 

preserved, for the most part, in the Gospel 
which goes by his name. When we find, there- 
fore, that the divine self-consciousness of Je- 
sus is clearly revealed in a passage like Matt, 
xi. 25-30, Luke x. 21-24, which was sub- 
jected to a critical examination and interpreta- 
tion in the light of modern scholarship in the 
chapter on ''The \'ocation of Jesus" — when 
we find that the divine self-consciousness here 
shines out with dazzling brightness in an ut- 
terance of our Lord's that can be traced back 
to that apostolic collection of discourses, com- 
mon to both Luke and our present Matthew, 
we need not concern ourselves at present with 
the examination of the critical difficulties 
which have been raised in connection with the 
baptismal formula as a post-resurrection ut- 
terance of our Lord's. Similarly when our 
Lord, in common discourse with the people, 
speaks of himself as "a greater than Jonas" 
and "a o-reater than Solomon"^^ we need not 



'Matt xii. 41, 4; 



And His Apostles 131 

go to Jewish theology and Messianic apoca- 
lypses, especially when of uncertain date, to 
find out what he meant ; for the context of the 
very book in which the reference to Jonah and 
Solomon occurs contains the explicit revela- 
tion of the divine consciousness that was in 
the speaker. If we doubt the controversies re- 
corded by St. John which Jesus is represented 
as having concerning his own person with the 
Jews in the temple courts at Jerusalem, what 
parable more evidently proceeded from our 
Lord's lips than the parable of the Wicked 
Husbandmen and the Slain Son delivered dur- 
ing passion week in that selfsame place ? That 
Son is expressly distinguished from the serv- 
ants of the householder, and of him, even in 
the hour of his weakness and death, Jesus 
says, in indisputably prophetic words, of 
which all history is the fulfillment, "The stone 
which the builders rejected, the same is be- 
come the head of the corner"; immediately 
adding his forecast of the conquering march 



132 The Christianity of Christ 

and universal destination of the kingdom, 
'The kingdom of God shall be taken from 
you, and given to a nation bringing forth the 
fruits thereof/^ And whosoever shall fall on 

^®The first demand upon criticism is that it be crit- 
ical j and not mere subjective arbitrariness. It is singu- 
lar how Harnack and Wernle cancel each other in their 
views of this passage. Harnack denies that this conclu- 
sion of the parable of the Wicked Husbandmen contains 
a reference to the Gentile mission. "The words of ]Matt. 
xxi. 43," he says, "do not refer to the Gentiles ; it is the 
'nation' as opposed to the official Israel." ("Expansion 
of Christianity," footnote, I. 42.) This is but the sub- 
terfuge, possibly unconscious, of a critic who has com- 
mitted himself to the exclusion of the universal mission 
from the Gospels of INIark and Matthew. (See p. 40.) 
Wernle reaches this passage after finding in Matt. xvi. 
18 the first utterance of "Roman Petrine tradition and 
the consciousness of Roman power." "For the first 
time, too, and surely not merely by chance, the Church 
and the kingdom are almost identified in this important 
ecclesiastical document," /. e., St. Matthew's Gospel. 
"In a passage peculiar to St. Matthew," he proceeds, i! 

"Jesus says to the Jews, 'The kingdom of God shall be 
taken away from you and shall be given to a nation 
bringing forth the fruits thereof.' What is the kingdom 



4 



And His Apostles 133 

this stone shall be broken ; but on whomsoever 
it shall fall it will grind him to powder."^^ If 
difficulties can be started in connection with 
the great commission as a word from the 
mouth of Jesus, none can vitiate the teaching 
of the indisputably genuine parable of the 
Good Samaritan which expressly aims at the 
destruction of the spirit which confines re- 
ligion within national and ecclesiastical bound- 
aries. And it was a heathen soldier of the 

of God that the Jews have possessed? It is not, as in 
other passages, the future Messianic kingdom, but the 
theocracy, the divine rule. The evangelist might just 
as well have said, 'Ye shall no longer be the Church.' " 
("Beginnings of Christianity," II. 85.) Thus Harnack 
arbitrarily deprives the words of their natural meaning 
and force, while Wernle sees in them only the embodi- 
ment of late ecclesiastical polemic between Christians 
and Jews. Both positions are unworthy the name of 
criticism, and are absolutely worthless for the removal 
of the Gentile mission from the teachings of Jesus. They 
afford an excellent illustration of the truth that the 
overthrow of criticism is found in better criticism. 
"Matt. xxi. 33-44. 



134 ^^^^ Christianity of Christ 

Empire, the Capernaum centurion, at the 
beauty and soHdity of whose character, in its 
humanity, HberaHty, humihty, and faith, Je- 
sus marveled; and, in the Hght of whose con- 
duct and example he was moved to say, ''I 
say unto you, I have not found so great faith, 
no, not in Israel. And I say unto you, that 
many shall come from the east and the west, 
and shall sit down with Abraham and Isaac 
and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven ; but the 
sons of the kingdom shall be cast forth into 
outer darkness. "^^ Jesus told his earliest dis- 
ciples that they were the salt of the earth and 
the light of the world ;^^ and yet there are those 
who deny the primitive missionary character 
and charter of his Church and the universal 
destination of the gospel as he preached it. 

2. The Epistles, if predominantly doctrinal, 
are by no means destitute of historical remi- 
niscences of the teachings and works of Jesus. 

''Matt. viii. 10-12. ''Matt. v. 13, 14. 



And His Apostles 135 

We have just seen how the first page of the 
New Testament, as we have it in the first chap- 
ter of First Thessalonians, presupposes the 
general currency and acceptance of Jesus' 
teaching concerning the Fatherhood of God. 
Despite many blemishes and shortcomings, 
some of which were of a serious nature, the 
early testimony is unanimous that a life of ex- 
traordinary purity and elevation was lived in 
the new communities. The Pauline Epistles 
everywhere bear witness to the deep reality of 
religious experience, and the precepts of Jesus 
are reflected in the life of love enjoined by the 
apostle. Moreover, as has often been indi- 
cated, the great outlines of the life of Jesus, — 
his birth of the lineage of David, his call of 
chosen men to. the apostolate, his institution of 
the Supper, his betrayal and shameful death, 
and his resurrection, — may be easily gathered 
out of the Epistles. That more of the life and 
teachings were not directly conveyed to the 
Gentile Churches may be regretted; but we 



13"^ The Christianity of CJirist 

must also consider what was possible in the 
great transplantation of Christianity in which 
St. Paul was the principal agent, and the need 
of simplification in preaching "Jesus and the 
resurrection/'-- or "Christ and him cruci- 
fied,""^ if these were really the saving facts 
and truths of the gospel. 

With this statement of two pleas in abate- 
ment as gathered out of the contents of the 
Gospels and the Epistles, respectively, I may 
now proceed to an examination of the grounds 
of the admitted general contrast between the 
Christianity of the Gospels and the Christianity 
of the Epistles. 

We must endeavor to transport ourselves out 
of the records of history, as contained in our 
documents, into the region of history itself, — 
an actual succession of objective events in the 
real life of the world. Unless they possessed 
an unusual importance in the view of the 
writers, quite disproportionate space is de- 

■\\cts xvii. i8. "^i Cor. ii. 2. 



And His Apostles i37 

voted in each of the Gospels to the last week 
of our Lord's life, from the triumphal entry 
into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday to the resur- 
rection. It is, indeed, difficult for us to realize 
the unparalleled impression made upon the 
apostles, and the revolution and creation of 
conviction, brought about by these final events. 
What had occurred ? ( i ) There had been the 
solemn institution of the memorial feast of the 
Lord's Supper, with which, our accounts au- 
thorize us to believe, there had been connected 
moving instruction on the significance of Je- 
sus' death on the morrow. (2) The betrayal, 
arrest, and trials before the ecclesiastical and 
civil authorities followed. (3) The crucifixion 
on Friday was an awful termination of the 
holy life of the great and innocent Master who 
had gone about doing good. (4) The resur- 
rection, with the appearances on that first 
Easter Sunday, furnished the tremendous cli- 
max of this tremendous week. To these events 
must be added ( 5 ) the intercourse of the forty 



13S The Christianity of Christ 

days; (6) the ascension; (7) Pentecost, the 
gift of the Spirit, and the birthday of the Chris- 
tian Church. 

Let us confine our attention to these seven 
events, each of them, we may well believe, of 
inexhaustible significance, through which the 
apostles must look back to the deeds and 
teachings of our Lord's ministry. 

First of all, the events themselves must have 
fastened and fascinated the minds of the dis- 
ciples. One needs only to allow the full im- 
pression of the freshness and vigor of the open- 
ing chapters of Acts to sink into his intelli- 
gence to recognize the inimitable reality of a 
living picture. The real character of Jesus, 
as Lord and Christ, repentance, remission of 
sins, and the gift of the Holy Ghost were the 
themes of St. Peter's preaching even before 
the conversion of St. Paul. 

Secondly, these events at the last recalled 
.'lUd reinterpreted all that Jesus had done and 
taught, especially his anticipations and instruc- 



And His Apostles 139 

tions concerning these very occurrences. From 
the time of Peter's confession in Cesarea Phi- 
lippi ''began Jesus to show unto his disciples, 
how that he must go unto Jerusalem, and suf- 
fer many things of the elders and chief priests 
and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again 
the third day."^^ That Jesus himself had not 
been indifferent to the question of his Person 
is shown by the question he himself propounded 
in Cesarea Philippi, ''Who do men say that I, 
the Son of man, am?"^^ Six days after this 
appeal of the Master, the confession of the 
rock apostle, and the conversation concerning 
the decease w^iich he should accomplish at 
Jerusalem, and the resurrection which should 
follow, occurred the transfiguration of Jesus 
in the high mountain apart. According to all 
the Synoptical Gospels, these events marked 
the crisis of our Lord's public ministry, and 
the whole series centers directly in himself. 

"Matt. xvi. 21. ^^Matt. xvi. 13. 



140 The Christianity of Christ 



When the fulfilhnent of the Saviour's predic- 
tions came with snch overwhelming might, his 
own teachings about himself, and revelations 
of himself, were, doubtless, for the first time 
grasped in their real and full significance. 

But, it may be said, if the transition from 
the Christianity of the Gospels to the Chris- 
tianity of the Epistles is to be explained by 
the interposition of this series of (say) seven 
events of a character so extraordinary and mi- 
raculous that they forever made Jesus himself 
the foundation of his religion, — nay, the very 
religion itself, — let us not forget that the trans- 
actions themselves belong to a category of 
which scientific history can take no account. 
It might be answered in a word. All the worse 
for scientific histor}^, which thus begs the ques- 
tion and declines to attempt the solution of the 
most urgent problem in the world's life! But 
let that pass. The queer thing is that the 
scientific historians, like Keim, Wernle, and 
company, have so little confidence in their own 



And His Apostles 141 

historical canons, and are so overwhelmed by 
the evidence contained in the simple, objective 
records which ha\'e come down to our times, 
that they are never content simply to cut out 
this section of our Lord's career and cast it 
aside as nothing worth. TJicy akcays manage 
to bring it hack into the circuit of history as 
the detenni)iing factor in the zAiole suhsequent 
development. And thereby they do exactly 
what St. Peter did in his earliest preaching and 
what St. Paul does in all his Epistles. Let us 
consider the resurrection alone. If this be 
allowed, all the rest follows with it. Take 
\\'ernle's treatment as typical : 

''Contrary to all expectations, the dispersed 
disciples began to gather together again, at 
first in Galilee and then in Jerusalem. 'He is 
not dead,' they cried in triumphant enthusiasm 
to the murderers of Jesus; 'he liveth.' The 
reckoning of the Sanhedrists turned out to be 
at fault. Their clever calculations proved to 
be the greatest folly and impolicy, for faith in 



142 The Cliristianity of Christ 

the crucified and risen Lord brought about that 
which faith in the hving Christ had not ac- 
compHshed : the foundation of the new Church, 
the separation from Judaism, the conquest of 
the world. 

"Whence this sudden change ? For that the 
disciples fled in confusion and consternation is 
a certain fact. Their answer was : the Lord 
has appeared to us, first to Peter, then to the 
twelve, then to more than five hundred breth- 
ren together, then to James, then to all of the 
apostles, last of all to Paul. From these ap- 
pearances, — the first must have taken place, ac- 
cording to the oldest accounts, in Galilee, — they 
inferred the facts of the resurrection and of the 
present life of Jesus in glory. In the very 
earliest time, when St. Paul obtained this in- 
formation from St. Peter, they were content 
with drawing these conclusions and required 
no further proofs. The new faith rests upon 
the appearances alone. 

"Our judgment as to these appearances de- 



^ 



And His Apostles 143 

pends upon the credibility which we attach to 
St. Paul and his informant, and still more 
upon our philosophical and religious stand- 
point, upon our 'faith.' Purely scientific con- 
siderations cannot decide where the question 
at stake is the existence or nonexistence of 
the invisible world, and the possibility of com- 
municating with spirits. Hence, too, all at- 
tempts at explanation, which rest upon the 
axiom that our world of phenomena is the 
only reality, are merely subjectively persuasive 
and convincing. The Christian faith always 
reckons with the reality of the other world 
which is our goal. A Christian, therefore, has 
no difficulty in accepting as the ground of his 
belief in the resurrection, the real projection of 
Jesus into this world of sense by means of a 
Vision. "^ 

A variety of reflections almost spontaneous- 
ly arises in the mind of a fairly thoughtful 

""Beginnings of Christianit}/' I. 114, 115. 



144 The Christianity of Christ 

reader of this passage. In the first place, we 
catch our young friend, — "professor extraordi- 
narius" in a German university, — despite his 
wondrous sleight of hand, in the very act of 
playing his old trick. Faith in the crucified 
and risen Lord, — that is, the Christianity of 
the Epistles, which is false, — accomplishes the 
founding of the Church and the concjuest of 
the world! a task utterly impossible to faith 
in the living Christ, — that is, the Christianity 
of the Gospels, which is true ! Really we must 
be excused from seriously considering a posi- 
tion which takes refuge in such legerdemain 
as this. In the next place, if St. Paul is a 
competent and veracious witness, — and what 
character in history is furnished with better 
credentials (2 Cor. xi. 22-28) ? — neither sci- 
ence nor philosophy, unless it be materialism, 
hinders the Christian from believinp; the resur- 
rection to have been "the real projection of 
Jesus into this world of sense." In other 
words, (i) if the fact of the resurrection rests 



And His Apostles 145 

upon the credibility of testimony, (2) if it 
is a question which purely scientific considera- 
tions are incompetent to decide, (3) if ideal- 
' istic philosophy can afford to laugh to scorn 
the mere suggestion that "our' world of phe- 
nomena is the only reality," or that it is onto- 
logically real at all, — all of which are positions 
accepted by Herr Wernle, — then the sane and 
serious theologian need not be troubled in the 
smallest degree about how this brilliant young 
professor explains the fact, or about the further 
reasons which he proceeds to assign for not 
believing it. Our final reflection must resolve 
itself into an expression of mere wonder that 
a man who possesses the great learning and 
ability which Professor Wernle evinces in 
many parts of his work could dismiss so grave 
a subject with a mere airy wave of the hand. 
But it is enough that Wernle, though he in- 
sists upon his paradox and absurdity of its 
falsehood, allows that the resurrection was the 
foundation of the Church and of the conquest 
10 



1^6 The Christianity of Christ 

of the world! Thus the resurrection was at 
once nothing and everything, and our scien- 
tific historian has without difficuUy solved his 
problem. 

The conclusion which a really historical con- 
sideration of the development of the Church 
forces upon the candid and careful inquirer is 
that the full and complete reconciliation of 
the Christianity of the Gospels, — the Chris- 
tianity of Christ, as it is sometimes called, — 
with the Christianity of the Epistles, or of the 
Apostles, is found in the overwhelmingly great 
series of actual occurrences which intervened 
between the close of the public ministry of our 
Lord and the day of Pentecost. It is with 
great difficulty that we can live again the life 
of that generation. Since Christianity is trans- 
mitted to us by an infinitely precious collection 
of sacred writings, it is Ytry difficult for us to 
realize, with the first generation of Christians, 
who had no New Testament, that the founda- 
tion of the Church and of its conquest of the 



And His Apostles 147 

world, — in a word, of Christendom, — is not a 
book but a Person — a divine Person who' lived 
a life, and died a death, "for our sins,"^^ and 
rose again from the dead, and being by the 
right hand of God exalted received of the Fa- 
ther the promise of the Holy Ghost, and poured 
forth the Christian Church of the centuries. 
"Other foundation can no man lay than that is 
laid, which is Jesus Christ."^^ Only when we 
pass from history as record to history as fact 
do we dig to» the deepest foundation of the 
Church in the sacrificial death and the glori- 
ous resurrection of the incarnate Son of God. 
There is no breach between this conception of 
the salvation wrought out by Jesus and the 
ethics and history of the spiritual life which 
fall from his lips in the Gospels. They were 
consistently united in the faith and life of the 
Apostolic Church, and the same living syn- 
thesis exists in the experience and conduct of 

^i Cor. XV. 3. ^®i Cor. iii. 11. 



148 TJic Christianity of Christ 



thousands of saints to-day. The separate rec- 
ords which we have in Gospels and Epistles 
have merely divided in the New Testament 
what from the beginning, /. c, from Pentecost, 
existed as one whole in the life of the Church 
and in the experience of the individual Chris- 
tian. Wliile some of the view points and 
experiences of Apostolic Christianity are un- 
doubtedly written back even into a few say- 
ings of Jesus as recorded in our Gospels,^^ the 
outstanding and overshadowing fact is that so 
truly and objectively did the Apostolic Church 
perform its task of drawing the picture of Je- 

^'So Shailer Mathews, "The Messianic Hope in the 
New Testament," p. 225 : "The original materials of the 
Gospels, as we have already seen, may be accepted as 
the work of the disciples of Jesus himself, but the 
Synoptic Gospels, as completed literary units, represent 
to a considerable degree the point of view of the Church 
during the last quarter of the first century." This truth 
is sufficiently recognized in the text above, but, in order 
to a true historical perspective, needs to be supplemented 
by the statement "the outstanding and overshadowing 
fact is that so truly and objectively did the Apostolic 
Church perform its task," etc. 



I 



And His Apostles 149 

sus as he lived and taught that the contrast is 
faithfully preserved between the days' of the 
Son of man and those of his follow^ers who 
planted the Church after his departure from 
the world. The problem of the literature, — 
the contrast of Gospels and Epistles. — is cre- 
ated by the fidelity of those who produced it. 

The title of this chapter was suggested by 
the language (quoted in a footnote on an 
earlier page) of Dr. Heinrich August Wil- 
helm Meyer, than whom Germany has pro- 
duced no greater exegete. It is but just to 
cite it here (in part) again: *'Hence the 
X6i[zevog Qs^eXioq is that laid by God, namely, 
Jesus Christ himself, the fundamentttm essen- 
tiale, he whom God sent, delivered up to death, 
raised again, and exalted, thereby making him 
to be for us wisdom and righteousness and 
sanctification and redemption. . . . This is 
the objective foundation which lies there for 
the whole of Christendom."^^ 

^"Commentary," i Cor. iii. 11. 



IV 

BIBLICAL CRITICISM AND THE 
CHRISTIAN FAITH 

(^50 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM AND THE 
CHRISTIAN FAITH.i 

I. Christianity as an Historical Religion 
Amenable to the Canons of His- 
torical Science. 

What are the foundations of the Christian 
faith in its Protestant form? The Reformers, 
accepting the character accorded the Bible in 
both the Jewish and the Romish Churches, sub- 
stituted for the infalHble Church, with its organ 
of Council or Pope, the infallible Bible, iner- 
rant in letter, and interpreted, nominally by the 
individual, but practically by the several sym- 
bols framed by the Reformation parties and 
peoples. This action was both polemically and 
historically justifiable, if not inevitable; since 
it was an appeal to a pure antiquity, in its pre- 

^A paper read at the Third Ecumenical Methodist 
Conference, ■ London, Sept., 1901. 

(■53) 



Of 



TJic Christianity of Christ 



sumably authentic records, against the recog- 
nized corruptions of a degenerate present. 

I. But is the truth of Christianity dependent 
upon the preserv^ation of an inerrant record? 
To state the question in this- form is to answer 
it with a negative. For Christianity is an his- 
torical rehgion which arose in a definite time 
and place; which was promoted by personal 
agents, who can be recognized and described; 
and which left behind it concrete and world- 
wide results, distinct and determinate in our 
day, and capable of being traced to their or- 
igin. If inerrant records are the necessary base 
of the science of history, then is scientific his- 
tory, in any form or sphere, civil or ecclesias- 
tical, impossible. On the contrary, all history 
worthy of the name begins with documentary 
criticism and the assortment and valuation of 
the available data. Christianity can be no ex- 
ception to this uniform procedure of history. 
Nor need it be. 

Moreover, the distinction must be definitely 



And His Apostles 155 

made between history external and objective, a 
series of events in the actual order of the life 
of the world, and history as mere narrative or 
record. The criticism of history as record is 
expressly that we may arrive at history as fact. 
The fact is antecedent, the record consequent; 
the fact is independent and exists, so to speak, 
in its own right and by its own force; while 
the record is dependent and relative, produced 
by force of the fact. In the sphere of historical 
Christianity the recognition of this self-evident 
principle is not, on the one hand, to fall into the 
Romish error of exalting tradition to an equal 
authority with Holy Scripture ; nor, on the oth- 
er, is it to accept the Anglican High-church her- 
esy of the supremacy of the Church because the 
Apostolic Church produced the New Testament, 
(i) In the presence of the High AngHcan 
it may be freely granted that the Christian 
Church is older than the New Testament, and 
has existed as a concrete, living reality in the 
world from the beginning till now ; but to these 



156 The Christianity of Christ 

obvious facts must be added the further fact 
that, if the first generation of Christians pro- 
duced the Xew Testament, as a record of the 
source and spring and dominating type of 
Christian Hfe, so the Xew Testament, not by vir- 
tue of any ecclesiastical definition of the canon, 
and not by any dogmatic assignment of exclu- 
sive authority or inerrancy, but because against 
all claimants it asserts historically its own truth 
as a contemporaneous record and as the living 
^^'ord of God, has begotten and nourished ev- 
ery generation of Christians since the first. 

(2) In the presence of the Romanist, with- 
out any theoretical denial of his principle of 
tradition, we may show that in view of the 
achievements of modern historical science, the 
only defensible sense of this term tradition is 
history; and that, without any dogmatic de- 
termination of its exclusive authority, or ics 
canonical limits, or its inerrancy as a record, 
the New Testament, under the sifting processes 
of criticism, effectively transmits to the present 



1 



And His Apostles 157 

generation a genuine historical deposit and 
achieves for itself the character of an authori- 
tative and exclusive source. These same prin- 
ciples, mutatis mutandis, apply to the Old Tes- 
tament. 

Hear the conclusion of the matter considered 
from the historical point of view : Christianity 
is an historically founded religion, living its 
historically traceable life in the world since the 
day of its birth, and exhibiting itself as the 
most real and stupendous fact of the present. 
Therefore, historical science alone can prima- 
rily transcend the dogmatic differences of Ro- 
manist, Anglican, and Protestant concerning 
the rule of faith and kindred questions, and 
lay solidly and permanently, not indeed in the 
realm of fact, but in the realm of conviction 
and personal belief, the massive foundations of 
the Christian faith. 

2. So far as the Old Testament, in our day 
the especial subject of literary and historical 
criticism, is concerned, we may accept the ver- 



Tiic Christianity of Christ 



diet of the Rev. S. R. Driver, who has given 
us the most careful and scholarly, at once the 
most candid and the most miodest, treatise in 
English on Old Testament Introduction. ''It 
is not the case that critical conclusions, such as 
those expressed in the present volume/' says 
Dr. Driver, in his rev/ritten sixth edition. *'are 
in conflict either with the Christian creeds or 
with the articles of the Christian faith. These 
conclusions affect not the fact of revelation, 
but only its form. They help to determine the 
stages through which it passed, the different 
phases which it assumed, and the process by 
which the record of it was built up. They do 
not touch either the authority or the inspira- 
tion of the Scriptures of the Old Testament." 

The publication in the last few years of such 
books as McCurdy's "Histor}-, Prophecy, and 
the Monuments" : Rogers's "Histor}^ of Baby- 
lonia and Assvria" : and Savce's "Hisrher Crit- 
icism and the Monuments'' and "Early Israel 
and the Surrounding Nations," with others 



And His Apostles 159 

that might be mentioned, has famiUarized the 
popular mind with the fact that there has been 
preserved a veritable historical record parallel, 
generally speaking, with that contained in the 
Old Testament, and serving valuable ends of 
elucidation and verification. Sayce and Hom- 
mel may have considerably exaggerated the 
value of these independent historical materials 
for the refutation of the literary and documen- 
tary analyses of higher criticism. But histori- 
ans will find higher and more constructive uses 
for these records unearthed by the pick and the 
spade than those of mere polemics. 

The data are in hand, and are daily increas- 
ing, for a positive historical reconstruction of 
that great ancient world of western Asia of 
which the life of Israel was a part. However 
the relative political or commercial importance 
of Israel may have suffered by the uncovering 
of this wider world, in which the Hebrews but 
seldom played a leading part, there is incalcula- 
ble gain in the securing of a correct historical 



i6o The Christianity of Christ 

perspective and in the illumination and com- 
pletion of what remains obscure or fractional 
in the Old Testament. What once stood alone 
in that ancient record, moreover, is now 
vouched for by many witnesses, telling of the 
same events from the standpoint of the party 
of the other part, and corroborating, with in- 
dependent freedom, what prophets and his- 
torians had set down in the sacred books of 
the Jews. Such are the priceless gifts which 
the science of history is now bestowing upon 
the interpretation of the Old Testament and 
upon the origins and early developments of 
revealed religion. 

II. The Historical Person and Teaching 
OF THE Divine Christ. 

In the second place, the science of history as 
concerned with the New Testament has surely, 
if at times slowly and painfully, led us back to 
the historical Jesus, who is himself the Alpha 
and Omega of the Christian religion. A great 



And His Apostles i6i 

body of Christ's own teaching is secure. This 
teaching is not only, for the most part, ration- 
ally and ethically self-evidencing, apart from 
the record that contains it, but it is ajso his- 
torically traceable to the lips of Jesus, and be- 
comes, historically and ethically, the norm and 
standard of all revelation contained in Holy 
Scripture. The notion of the equal value of 
every part of Scripture for ethics and religion 
is no longer a formula to which the Christian 
is required to give his assent. "Holy Scrip- 
ture containeth all things necessary to sal- 
vation," is the measured language of our Ar- 
ticle of Religion. The ethics of the Sermon 
on the Mount cut from the neck of the Chris- 
tian Church the millstone of the ethics of the 
Conquest of Canaan. The parable of the Lost 
Son is the uncovering of the heart of God by 
the hand of his Son, and the imperishable 
apologetic of the Christian faith framed by its 
Founder and Head. The Beatitudes are an 
immeasurable advance on the Tables of the 
II 



1 62 The Christianity of Christ 

Law, and should preferably be engraven on 
the heart of every Christian child. Moreover, 
while Jesus pronounced upon no modern crit- 
ical question of date or authorship, the free- 
dom of his attitude toward Moses, every- 
where evinced in his discourses, may be taken 
as the warrant of the privilege and the duty of 
historical critici-sm. When Jesus said that 
Moses for the hardness of their hearts suf- 
fered the Israelites to put away their wives, 
he proved himself a critic of the keenest in- 
sight, for he at once explained the temporary 
exception and condemned it as a rule of life 
by the weight of eternal truth. At the same 
time we must remember that the Old Testa- 
ment, with which we deal, is the Bible of Je- 
sus' personal edification and of his public min- 
istry, and that, while he has set us the exam- 
ple of a great "discrimination," to use the 
aptly chosen word of Professor George Adam 
Smith, "what was indispensable to the Re- 
deemer," if T may again adopt the language 



And His Apostles 163 

of this scliolar, "must always be indispensable 
to the redeemed." 

Let us remind ourselves, also, that the body 
of teaching traceable to the lips of Jesus is 
not confined to the Synoptical Gospels. More 
and more the phenomena of the Fourth Gos- 
pel attest its composition by an eyewitness of 
the ministry of Jesus, and fix its date well 
within the limits of the first Christian century. 
I am not unaware of the radical attitude to- 
ward the evangelical tradition assumed by 
one of our two new Bible dictionaries. In- 
deed, I exercised the privilege of transferring 
to the pages of the journal which I have the 
honor to edit the masterly expose of the rad- 
ical positions of the Encyclopccdia Biblica, 
which proceeded from the able pen of the 
present honored President of the British Con- 
ference, and recent Fraternal Delegate to the 
General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal 
Church, South. But, despite such radical de- 
fections, and the grievous hurt to the common 



164 The Christianity of Christ 

Christian cause resulting from such pubHca- 
tions, the Gospel of John, — for the Gospel of 
the Apostle it is, — steadily wins its way to a 
wider and more assured critical acceptance. 

It unites two apparently irreconcilable char- 
acters : ( I ) a marvelous minuteness of narra- 
tive detail and vividness of picturesque repro- 
duction far surpassing anything found in the 
Synoptical Gospels; and (2) an absoluteness 
of universal and final statement of the pro- 
foundest truths of the Gospel which befits it 
as the conclusion and crown of the literature 
of the Xew Testament. Both these character- 
istics equally bespeak first-hand knowledge; 
while its independent scheme of chronology, 
and the general freedom and firmness of the 
author's deviations from the Synoptical tra- 
dition, both by omission and addition, attest 
the accuracy and certainty of his knowledge, 
and his unchallenged apostolic position and 
authority in the closing decades of the first 
centurv. The Eternal Divine Word Incar- 



And His Apostles 165 

nate, whose nature and relations with the Fa- 
ther and the world are revealed in the Fourth 
Gospel with a precision and completeness 
which dogmatic theology may imitate, but 
cannot surpass, and yet in unfailing harmony 
with the lowlier and more human representa- 
tions of the Synoptical tradition, becomes the 
sole and sure and sufficient foundation of the 
Christian faith. "Other foundation can no 
man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus 
Christ." He is the Way, the Truth, and the 
Life. 

III. Christian Experience. 

The third and final foundation of the faith 
to which I would invite attention in this con- 
nection is Christian experience. I may intro^ 
duce the subject with the words of the late 
Professor W. Robertson Smith: "The per- 
suasion that in the Bible God himself speaks 
words of love and life to the soul is the es- 
sence of the Christian conviction as to the 
truth and authority of Scripture. . . . The 



1 66 The Christianity of Christ 

element of personal conviction, which lifts 
faith out of the region of probable evidence 
into the sphere of divine certainty, is given 
only by the Holy Spirit still bearing witness 
in and with the A\'ord.'" We might suspect 
that these were the words of an historical 
skeptic offering us stones for bread, were it 
not that the "testimonium Spiritus Sancti" 
in the absence of all critical controversy, had 
long before been unanimously appealed to by 
the Reformers as the supreme and final war- 
rant of Holy Scripture; and were it not fur- 
ther true that our ^Methodist doctrine of the 
witness of the Spirit, if confined to the single 
point of our knowledge that we are the chil- 
dren of God, is. by common consent of com- 
petent theologians, too narrow. "He that is 
spiritual judgeth all things," and John Wes- 
ley, with a spirit of prophecy in this, as in the 
case of the lower criticism (as indicated by a 
comparison of the text of his Xotes on the 
Xew Testament v.-ith that of the Revisers of 



And His Apostles 167 

1 88 1, or of Westcott and Hort), anticipated 
Schleiermacher and the theologians of our own 
day who would verify the entire dogmatic sys- 
tem by analysis of the implicit presuppositions 
and contents of Christian experience. 

This doctrine is no city of refuge, newly 
formed by theologians for whom the histor- 
ical foundations have given way. On the con- 
trary, the uniform, definite, and permanent el- 
ements of Christian experience, in the convic- 
tion and forgiveness of sin, the impartation of 
life, and the purification of the nature, with 
the recognition of Father, Son, and Spirit, as 
the Authors and Agents of this great salva- 
tion, constitute a scientifically recognizable and 
definable phenomenon of age-long and world- 
wide occurrence. "Eye hath not seen, nor ear 
heard, neither have entered into the heart of 
man, the things which God hath prepared for 
them that love him; but God hath revealed 
them unto us by his Spirit.'' The Spirit's rev- 
elation of spiritual things to the spiritual man 



1 68 The Christianity of Christ 

is thus, not only the normal privilege but the 
necessary foundation of Christian faith and 
the Christian life. This truth, which first rose 
on my soul in full-orbed splendor when, as a 
young Methodist preacher, I eagerly perused 
your Dr. Burt Pope's ''Compendium of Chris- 
tion Theology," Methodism has a special com- 
mission to preach and to teach. It is not hers 
by right of discovery, for it has belonged to 
all the Christian Churches and centuries. It 
is no peculiar depositum, but it harmonizes 
with the genius of Methodism in its special 
emphasis upon Christian experience, and in 
its assertion of that large liberty wherewith 
Christ makes all his people free.^ The Spirit's 

"Professor Friedrich Loofs, of the University of 
Halle, in the article on Methodism in the new edition 
of the Hauck-Herzog "Realencyclopadie fiir protes- 
tantische Theologic und Kirche," cites with approval 
this address on "Biblical Criticism and the Christian 
Faith" as exponential of the present position of Metho- 
dism and as "placing by the side of all external criti- 
cism the test'wwnium Spiritns Sancti." He quotes 
freely from the text above. 



I 



And His Apostles 169 

work in the human soul is in perfect con- 
formity with the Spirit's work in the Word; 
but that which is immediate with me is the 
guarantee of that record of the experience of 
prophet and apostle, immediate with them, but 
conveyed to me through the medium of a 
written record. 

God in the World, God in the Word, God 
in Christ, God in the Soul, — Creation, Inspi- 
ration, Incarnation, Regeneration, — these are 
doubtless mysteries all, containing at bottom 
a residuum of the inexplicable. But they are 
parallel mysteries, each carrying with it a 
weight of analogical evidence for the truth 
of all the others, and each in its own sphere 
an example of that mighty working whereby 
God is able to subdue all things unto himself. 
For us the regenerating act of the Holy Ghost 
is indeed private and personal; but for that 
very reason, having experienced in our own 
hearts this solitary union of the divine and 
human, the presence of God in Nature, in 



170 The Christianity of Christ 

Christ, and in the Bible, while still mysterious, 
becomes credible and certain. 

Thus the strands (i) of historical Chris- 
tianity, (2) of the Divine Christ, and (3) of 
the certainties of Christian experience unite to 
form a threefold cord which cannot easily be 
broken. The time for readjustment to the 
main conclusions of historical criticism has al- 
most fully come. We are not called upon, in- 
deed, for a final judgment upon them all; 
many things remain in doubt; some, from the 
insufficiency of the materials at command, will 
probably always remain in doubt. But the 
main problems, such as those of the Hexa- 
teuch and of Isaiah, appear to have been sat- 
isfactorily solved, and, amid considerable dif- 
ferences on details, there is essential agree- 
ment among the greater critics as to methods, 
grounds, and results. So far as I can see, 
there is no reason to anticipate such a reaction 
from, and repudiation of, the historical crit- 
icism of the Old Testament, as Ixfell the Tii- 



And His Apostles 171 

bingen criticism of the New ; for that criticism 
was essentially an attempt to rewrite history 
on the basis of Hegelian a priori philosophy. 
There is nothing common to these two schools 
and epochs of criticism, and it is unsafe to the 
last degree to argue from the fate which over- 
took one to a kindred overthrow which must 
speedily befall the other. 

No; let us not fight as those who beat 
the air. Rather, possessing the precious pearl 
and imperishable treasure of the Kingdom of 
Heaven, sitting at the feet of the incompar- 
able Teacher, the Eternal Divine Word In- 
carnate, and being guided by the Spirit of 
the Father and of the Son into all the truth, 
let us hold fast the profession of our faith 
without wavering, receiving the kingdom which 
cannot be moved, even though this same pro- 
fession carries with it the removal of those 
things that are shaken, as of things that are 
made, that those things which cannot be shak- 
en may remain. 



172 The Clirisliauity of Christ 

XOTE. 

It may not be improper to add that the fore- 
going essay \\as confined to twenty minutes' 
reading before the Third Ecumenical }^Ietho- 
dist Conference, and was written during the 
voyage across the Atlantic. It was my inten- 
tion to revise and enlarge the whole for publi- 
cation here; but, as the paper has been several 
times printed and is, in a sense, no longer my 
property, I have, on second thought, confined 
the revision to cutting out one or two sen- 
tences and the insertion of as many more. I 
was followed by the Rev. ^larshall Randies, 
D.D., of the Wesleyan ^Methodist Church, in 
a ten minutes' address on "Recent Corrobora- 
tions of the Scripture Narratives,'' and by 
Chancellor D. S. Stephens, D.D., of the :\Ieth- 
odist Protestant Church, in an address of the 
same length on "The Appeal of the Old Tes- 
tament to the Life and Conscience of To-day." 
Whereupon, the floor was first secured by the 
Rev. W. T. Davison, M.A., D.D., then Presi- 



I 



And His Apostles 173 



dent of the British Wesleyan Conference, and 
next by the Rev. Joseph Agar Beet, D.D., who 
spoke five minutes each. My apology for the 
insertion of their remarks must be found in 
the fact that they enable the reader to judge 
how far my very brief and imperfect paper, 
as commented upon by these able scholars, may 
be accepted as representing, according to Pro- 
fessor Loofs's use of it, the general position of 
Methodism, in the Eastern no less than the 
Western Section of the Ecumenical Confer- 
ence. The Methodist Recorder for Septem- 
ber 9, 1 90 1, under the headlines, "A Brief but 
Important Conversation," 'The Doctors do not 
Differ," thus reproduces 

Dr. Davison's Remarks. 

"Mr. President and Brethren, I feel quite 
unequal to making a five minutes' speech upon 
this great subject, but I have risen in order to 
say one or two things which I think should 
be said at this time. The first is to bear my 



174 ^^'^ Christianity of Christ 

humble testimony as a representative on the 
Eastern side to the remarkably able paper of 
Dr. Tigert to which we have had the oppor- 
tunity of listening. (Applause.) I will not 
try at this moment to characterize that timely 
and able and helpful and suggestive produc- 
tion. I am quite sure that when we come to 
read it carefully we shall find how much it 
contains. We had some idea as the paper was 
somewhat rapidly read, but it needs to be 
much more carefully read in order to be ap- 
preciated. Another thing which I wanted to 
try to say, if I could, in a minute and a half is 
this, that God is trying to teach his Church, 
I believe, at this hour by means of historical 
and literary criticism as he has taught and 
guided his Church by other means outside the 
Church in the course of past ages. We often 
hear the phrase about more light breaking out 
of the Holy Word, and it is true that we shall 
continually find more and more to study in 
the Book itself. But God teaches us by light 



And His Apostles 175 

from outside shining upon the Word, and I 
believe that we have learned a great deal from 
the relation between Scripture and pure sci- 
ence, and that we have learned a great deal, 
or we might have learned a great deal, from 
the relation between scriptural teaching and 
social theories, and that God has intended to 
teach his Church by mieans of these move- 
ments round about us, and I hope that we 
have had grace to learn some lessons. I be- 
lieve that with regard to the subject of the 
historical and literary criticism and examina- 
tion of the Bible as a record which is now 
proceeding God has many things to teach us. 
Some of them we have already learned — that 
human faith as such is an amalgam, and that 
we have to find out by a process of trial how 
much of that is human and how much divine. 
When we examine the historical criticism of 
the Old Testament, and the historical criticism 
of the New Testament, which is now causing 
so much attention, we shall not find it a dif- 



ijo TJie CJiristianity of Christ 

ficult thing" to separate between those elements 
which are transitory and those which are per- 
manent. I beheve that Dr. Tigert has led us 
very largely upon the right lines in those two 
matters. I do not myself think that we should 
be too anxioiis about confirmations of the 
accuracy of the Scripture historv- in all de- 
tails whether from archaeology or from other 
sources. We welcome them. I do not think 
that we need to be anxious about the matter, 
or to put out anxious hands to catch hold of 
every possible confirmatioii and dwell upon 
it, any more than we need fear on the other 
side here and there a discrepancy. Rather I 
believe that attention is being drawn to the 
spiritual character of that Book which offers 
us the ultimate ground of appeal, and the 
authoritative rule of faith and practice — the 
character of it, the spiritual power of it, and 
the relation between the Bible and the Church, 
and between the Bible and Christian con- 
sciousness. All these matters are being 



And His Apostles i77 

brought out, I believe, more clearly than they 
ever have been before, on account of the his- 
torical and literary criticism to which the Bible 
' has been subjected in our generation. There 
is only one other thing which I wanted to say, 
and it is this, that as we meet from both sides 
of the Atlantic I hope that we shall cooper- 
ate. I hope that those interested in topics 
of this kind will cooperate in the defense of 
our faith. I dare not speak for others — and 
yet I think I may; but we upon our side wel- 
come the cooperation of scholars and Bible 
students on the other side of the Atlantic as 
represented by Dr. Tigert and many more. 
I hope that this Ecumenical Conference will not 
pass away without, in some fashion or anoth- 
er, so bringing us nearer together that in the 
next decade, by the blessing of God, more 
good work may be done for biblical scholar- 
•ship than ever has been done in the past." 

Then follows the address of the Rev. Dr. J. 
A. Beet, the distinguished commentator, then 

12 



17S The Christianity of Christ 

professor in the Richmond Theological College 
of the Wesleyan Methodist Church. 

Dr. Beet's Address. 

''I wish to express my strong agreement 
with the admirable paper which we have just 
had from Dr. Tigert ; but I wish to supplement 
it by a few remarks which I think ought to be 
made in this Conference. If we call attention 
to recent corroborations of the scriptural nar- 
rative, we are bound to admit that in some 
cases recent research has, in some small de- 
tails, contradicted that narrative, and has gone 
far toward disproving its absolute verbal ac- 
curacy. Nay, more. Recent and careful study 
of the Bible has compelled us to modify a 
theory of inspiration held by our fathers in 
the middle decades of the last century. Not 
that we have changed our doctrines. We hold 
firmly and unanimously the gospel which Wes- 
ley preached, the glad tidings of salvation 
which kindled the flame of the Methodist Re- 



And His Apostles 179 

vival. Some one said the other day that Meth- 
odists were unanimous in holding fast the 
teaching of Wesley. He might have gone 
further and said that wherever to-day, in 
the Anglo-American race, there is aggressive 
evangelism, it is inspired by the same teach- 
ing. The theology of Wesley is the saving 
faith of the millions who speak the English 
language. But some sixty years ago, good 
men, in their wish to pay honor to the Book of 
God, propounded a theory of its origin and 
inspiration, derived not from study of the Bi- 
ble, but from a priori reasoning about it, a 
theory which went far beyond the evidence. 
From the untenable position then taken up we 
have retreated to an impregnable position by 
careful study of the Bible itself. Such retreat 
has saved many an army. It is our only safety. 
We must ask you to have patience with bib- 
lical scholarship. It has done much for the 
spiritual life of the servants of Christ. It has 
given to us a purer text of the Bible itself 



i8o The Christianity of Christ 

and a more accurate knowledge of the lan- 
guages in which it was written, and has thus 
brought us nearer to the still small voice which 
speaks therein. It has given to us a more in- 
telligible Bible, and the Bible thus interpreted 
is the only safe theological text-book. But I 
cannot deny that not a few able biblical schol- 
ars reject all the distinctive elements of the 
gospel of Christ. These men, in spite of many 
services in the details of biblical scholarship, 
we must meet with resolute opposition. But 
in our opposition we must discriminate. If 
we shut our eyes and strike out right and left 
we shall strike our friends, mistaking them for 
foes. For instance, some scholars deny, simply 
because it conflicts with their theory of the 
universe, the possibility of a dead man's re- 
turn to life, and therefore refuse to discuss 
the abundant and overwhelming evidence that 
Christ rose from the dead. The dogmatism 
of rationalists is no reason why we should re- 
vile a man because after careful study he does 



.^;j(/ His Apostles iSi 

not think that the last twenty-six chapters of 
the book of Isaiah come from the same pen as 
do the earher chapters. After all, questions 
of date and authorship must be left to those 
who have made them their special study. Such 
questions we cannot settle by appealing either 
to the tradition of the Church or to our own 
religious experience." 



APPENDIX 



PFLEIDERER'S ^'EARLY CHRISTIAN 
CONCEPTION OF CHRIST"^ 

I MUST be pardoned for saying flatly that I 
cannot understand how Professor Pfleiderer 
could have written such a book as this unless 
he had first forgotten all the deeper teachings 
of the New Testament about Christ. The 
learned occupant of the chair of theology in 
Berlin University is a mythologist pure and 
simple. Much learning has certainly made 
him mad. The reflection that has been run- 
ning through my mind in reading this little 
volume is one of satisfaction that its pages 
will never be perused by the common, blatant 

"The Early Christian Conception of Christ : Its Sig- 
nificance and Value in the History of Religion." Ex- 
panded from a Lecture delivered before the International 
Theological Congress at Amsterdam, September, 1903. 
By Otto Pfleiderer, Professor of Theology in the Uni- 
versity of Berlin. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 
London: Williams and Norgate. 1905. i2mo; pp. 170. 

('85) 



1 86 The Christianity of Christ 

iniidel of the street. He would find here more 
d\Tiamite to be exploded under the walls of 
Christianity than could be supplied by a whole 
generation of Ingersolls. Professor Pfleiderer 
repudiates from his first page to his last the 
historical foimdations of the supernatural and 
divine elements in Christianity. While de- 
clining to assert historical connection between 
the heathen and the Christian m}'ths. both 
alike are set aside as the baseless fabric of a 
dream. Historical Christianity having been 
ignored by a process of criticism that is as 
shallow as it is false, the author attempts to 
give a purely ideal worth to the Christian 
m}'ths which is of more value than the original 
historical content. If Professor Pfleiderer 
really believes that the historical foundations 
of Christianity^ can be utterly subverted, and 
the religion itself continue an eternal fountain 
of light and life to blind and perishing men, 
he is capable of a credulity a thousand-fold 
greater than that of a believer in the incarna- 



And His Apostles 187 

tion and the resurrection. In his concluding 
pages the author tells us that we are to ''free 
ourselves from the fatal ban of historicism," 
that we are to ''let history point the way above 
history," that "myth and rite were certainly 
the most suitable forms of expression for 
primitive Christian belief/' Is this David 
Strauss come to life again ? Is it possible that 
historical scholars will have to repeat the tre- 
mendous labor of killing once more this snake 
that was thought to be dead fifty years ago? 
Certain it is that Pfleiderer seems to be in the 
stage that Strauss reached just before his final 
plunge over the precipice, when he was still 
crying "All's well." A moment later came the 
despairing confession, "All is lost." It is a 
shame that a man entertaining views destruc- 
tive of the very foundations of Christianity 
should be occupying the chair of theology in 
the greatest university of the land of Luther. 
A mature theologian may read Pfleiderer's 
book without damage — no doubt such ought 



i88 The Christianity of Christ 

to read it. But it has been many a day since 
a volume has passed imder my eye from which 
exhaled a more deadly infidelity than from this. 
But. after all. it is not a book difficult for 
the historical student of Christian origins to 
answer. So far are the central facts and doc- 
trines of Christianity from being capable of 
a mythical explanation, that the wonder is 
that so little of that world of demonism and 
apocah-ptic fancy into which Christianity was 
bom. both among the Jews and the heathen, 
clung to the Xew Testament record, or even 
as barnacles to the hull of the great ship of 
Christianity as it cleft its way through those 
dark waters. It is safe to say that, whatever 
may still linger in modem Romanism, there 
is not a single essential fact, doctrine, or prin- 
ciple of Christianity, as held and taught in 
the purer forms of Protestantism, that can be 
shown to be so much as tainted with any ele- 
ment of Jewish or heathen m}'tholog>'. Sim- 
ilarly, the Epistle to the Hebrews in the early 



And His Apostles 189 

Church subordinated and abolished that min- 
istry and mediation of angels to which the 
later Jewish theology attached so much im- 
portance. Outside of Romanism, so far as I 
am aware, there is no survival of that Jewish 
angelology against which the author of the 
Epistle to the Hebrews aimed his polemic. The 
Jewish theology may have taught that the 
Archangel Michael was the guardian and heav- 
enly representative of the nation, and it may 
be possible to find traces of this idea in that 
most mysterious of all the New Testament 
books, the Apocalypse; but for all Protestant 
Christians Jesus Christ is the only Apostle and 
High Priest of our profession, and to no other 
being, angel or saint, do Protestants look for 
heavenly intercession. It is no doubt true that 
in the extra-canonical literature of the sub- 
apostolic age may be found a virtual identifi- 
cation of the Archangel Michael and Jesus 
Christ, but this is the very literature which the 
Christian consciousness of that age refused a 



190 The Christianity of Christ 

place in the canon of the Xew Testament. \\q 
are no doubt beginning to understand in our 
day better than ever before the steps of the 
emergence of Christianity from the status of 
a Jewish sect to that of the early Catholic 
Church. The extra-canonical and apocalyptic 
literature, much of which had wide circulation 
in some Christian circles, is beginning to im- 
press us with the view that much ignorance and 
superstition, on the part of some of the earliest 
converts to Christianity, was compatible with 
the reality of Christian faith and life. One 
needs to travel only to ^lexico and South 
America on this continent, and to Spain and 
Italy on the other, among the debased Romish 
populations, to be satisfied that what was true 
in the first and second centuries is still true in 
the nineteenth and twentieth. But, on this ac- 
count, to attempt to rewrite the history of the 
Christian origins, as Pfleiderer and Wernle 
have done, on the hypothesis that these ex- 
crescent superstitions and mythologies explain 



And His Apostles 191 

everything, is unhistorical and preposterous. 
These things were never at home in Chris- 
tianity and, even if they were, which is, of 
course, the contention of the mythologists, the 
fact that the vigorous Hfe of the system threw 
them off is sufficient proof that something else 
dwelt in it from the beginning. 

The truth is that the novelty of these new 
apocalyptic studies has very much exaggerated 
their importance. It is a long road that the the- 
ology of the next generation has to travel, but I 
do not doubt its ultimate triumph even with such 
traitors as Pfleiderer and Wernle in the camp. 
The whole Old Testament Messianism has to be 
studied exhaustively in the historical spirit. A 
fresh historical conception of revelation and its 
method has to be worked out and firmly se- 
cured. The Messianism of the New Testament 
has to be studied afresh in the Ught of these 
results. Instead of beginning at the periphery, 
as Pfleiderer now does, all the data at our com- 
mand must be used for probing the self-con- 



192 The Christianity of Christ 

sciousness of Jesus to its depths. Then again 
shall a great light arise in the midst of dense 
theological darkness to enlighten the nations — 
even the Germans. Christ will once more prove 
himself the center and substance of his reli- 
gion. The Church has nothing to fear while 
the incomparable records of his life and teach- 
ings are read every Sunday from her pulpits. 
It is no doubt true, that for purposes of the- 
ology too abstract a view has been taken of the 
early history of Christianity. Christianity was 
far from being the only thing in the world of 
the first century into which it was born; nor 
was the New Testament the only professedly 
Christian literature that circulated widely in 
the Church before the consolidation of the 
canon. As has been intimated above, these 
things are beginning to be better known in our 
day than ever before. But we are still in the 
alphabet of these investigations. Professor 
Charles is very generally esteemed the first au- 
thority, for example, as the editor of the texts 



And His Apostles 193 

of Jewish apocalypses, such as that of Enoch, 
cited in the Epistle of Jude. Yet we do not 
travel far among the critics, before we find the 
suspicion expressed that Charles is all wrong 
^in some of his. fundamental principles of ar- 
rangement and interpretation. Certainly it is 
altogether too early in the day for such icono- 
clasts and, — though it seem overbold, we ven- 
ture to add, — sciolists as Pfleiderer and Wernle 
to begin rewriting the history of Christianity 
from the assumption that the consciousness 
of Jesus Christ was submerged in these Jew- 
ish speculations, an insignificant fragment of 
which barely shows above the surface of the 
New Testament in the obscure Epistle of Jude. 
I am not so presumptuous as to put forward 
these reflections as if they ought to be consid- 
ered a detailed, historical reply to Pfleiderer. 
Better scholarship and larger materials than 
I possess will be needed for this task. But I 
am thoroughly convinced that I have given 
no unjust, — nay, no ungenerous, — account of 
13 



194 ^^^^ Christianity of Christ 

his position; nor have I exaggerated the plain 
historical considerations which render his po- 
sition untenable. It is, indeed, a deep grief 
that professedly Christian theologians should, 
in some instances, prove the most dangerous 
foes of the faith. But, from the beginning, it 
has been so, and it will probably continue so to 
the end. 

When Pfleiderer exhorts us to ''let his- 
tory point the way above history," he is 
really demanding that Christianity shall 
breathe in a vacuum. The truth is that all 
theological study is now resolving itself into 
history — none more so than exegesis and dog- 
ma. Historical theology has practically the 
whole field to itself. If Christianity is routed 
on the field of history, it can never again set 
its scattered forces in battle array. Yet this is 
just what Pfleiderer proposes to concede in the 
outset, — namely, that Christianity has no secure 
intrenchments on the historical field, — and to 
make this fatal concession the principle of a 



And His Afostles . 195 

new apologetic which is to- win permanent 
peace and final victory. I repeat with the 
earnestness of the most solemn conviction that 
no more deadly foe of the faith has pitched his 
tent on the field of open and declared infidelity. 
As relentless war must be declared against such 
apologists as against the external enemy. Such 
wholesale denial, on alleged historical grounds, 
of the very forces which make history is 
reached not by criticism, but by hypercriticism 
or, as that name has been repudiated, by 
pseudo-criticism. An historical science which 
makes of the progress of humanity a series of 
mistakes bound up in one huge blunder is as 
impossible as a scientific explanation of the 
world which starts with the denial of intelli- 
gence and purpose. Both end in the blind alley 
of atheism. 



LOISY'S 'THE GOSPEL AND THE 
CHURCH."i 

M. Loisy's contention may be very well repre- 
sented by a paragraph at the beginning of the 
third chapter of his section on the Church : 
"Thus to reproach the Catholic Church for the 
development of her constitution is to reproach 
her for having chosen to live, and that, more- 
over, when her life was indispensable to the 
preservation of the gospel itself. There is no- 
where in her history any gap in continuity, or 
the absolute creation of a new system: every 
step is a deduction from the preceding, so that 
we can proceed from the actual constitution of 
the Papacy to the Evangelical Society around 
Jesus, different as they are from one another, 
without meeting any violent revolution to 

^"The Gospel and the Church." By Alfred Loisy. 
Translated by Christopher Home. New York: Charles 
Scribner's Sons. 1904. i2mo; pp. vi, 277. 

(196) 



And His Apostles 197 

change the government of the Christian com- 
munity. At the same time every advance is 
explained by a necessity of fact accompanied by 
logical necessities, so that the historian cannot 
say that the total extent of the movement is 
outside the gospel. The fact is, it proceeds 
from it and continues it." 

This is the antipodes of Herr Harnack's an- 
nouncement that "God and the soul, the soul 
and its God, are the whole contents of the 
gospel." Both positions are false. Harnack's 
doctrine is an arbitrary and unhistorical limita- 
tion of the teaching of Jesus under the influ- 
ence of a self-chosen canon of the absolute and 
relative in the gospel. His own Person and 
mediation are an essential part of the gospel of 
Jesus which Harnack seeks thus to exclude. 
Loisy is right enough in his negative criticism, 
but wrong in his positive historical construction. 
We can well understand how a man of schol- 
arship and intelligence, finding himself en- 
meshed in the actual Roman Church by his 



198 The Christianity of Christ 

priesthood in 11, might sophisticate his mind 
with some such line of thought as that stated 
above. There are crises, and even periods, in 
the histof}' of mediaeval Christianit)- when it 
has a relative justification. But when one with 
adequate historical and dogmatic knowledge 
undertakes the detailed application of the prin- 
ciple asserted to the doctrine, government, and 
worship of the Roman Church, it breaks down 
in a thousand particulars. That form of Giris- 
tianit)', in comparison with its purer Protestant 
embodiments, has the scantiest claim to inclu- 
sion in the Catholic Church. It is hopefid to 
see a Roman theologian alive to such questions 
as have agatated the mind of M. Loisv and will- 
ing to discuss them, but his limitations are pain- 
ful and his embarrassments e\-ident. It is diffi- 
cult to belie\-e in the intellectual honest)^ of a 
man who could defend the monstrous perser- 
sion of the mass in a paragraph like this : 

"The development of the Eucharist has been 
mainly theological and liturgical. At bottom the 



And His Apostles 199 

belief and the rite have no more changed than 
have the behef in baptism and its rite. The 
Supper of the early Christians was a memorial 
of the Passion and an anticipation of that festi- 
val of the Messiah whereat Jesus was present. 
There is no very marked difference between the 
Pauline conception of the Eucharist and the 
idea that simple Christians [in the Roman 
Church, he means] have of it to-day, those who 
are strangers to the speculations of theology, 
who believe that they enter into real communion 
with God in Christ by taking the consecrated 
bread [as if the adoration of the host, familiar 
to every Romanist, could possibly be described 
in these terms] . The simple blessing and dis- 
tribution of wine, detached from the love feast, 
surrounded by readings and prayers and hymns, 
became the offering of the mass. Since the 
death of Jesus was conceived as a sacrifice, the 
act commemorating this death naturally par- 
took of the same character. The liturgical 
form helped to impart the same thing, by the 



200 The Christianity of Christ 

real offering of the bread and wine, and the 
participation of all the faithful in the sanctified 
food, as in the sacrifices of the ancients. Thence 
came the idea of a commemorative sacrifice, 
which simply perpetuated that of the Cross, 
took nothing from its significance or its merit, 
and satisfied all the aims included in the com- 
mon prayer of the Church, interests spiritual 
and temporal, the salvation of the living and 
the dead. . . . The evolution of the Eu- 
charist ended in private masses for the priests, 
and communions of piety for the faithful." 

That the mass as practiced in the Roman 
Church takes nothing from its significance and 
merit of the sacrifice of the Cross is simply 
false. When the masses for the repose of the 
souls of the departed are paid for by the living, 
it is because they are taught to believe that 
something more than the already accomplished 
passion of the Saviour is necessary, and that 
the priest is competent to repeat on the altar 
a sacrifice to God which will bring about the 



And His Apostles. 201 

desired release of souls from purgatory. The 
rest of Loisy's appeal to history in this matter 
may be accepted as a fair imitation of the 
truth ; but after all it is an account of the evolu- 
tion of deadly error and falsehood. It came 
about, no doubt, after some such fashion as he 
has described; nevertheless, the Eucharist of 
the Gospels and the Romish mass are separated 
by the polar diameter. It is a reactionary and 
spurious "catholicity," false to the principles of 
the Protestant Reformation, which leads the 
priestlings and apists of the English Church to 
smuggle in their poor imitations, under cover of 
an ambigious or antiquated rubric, against the 
express and unmistakable declarations of the 
Articles of Religion. The wretched taste of it 
all struck such an aesthetic genius as Matthew 
Arnold when he witnessed the new-fangled imi- 
tation in the English Church; but deeper than 
all questions of taste is the sacrifice of the truth 
for which Protestant England and her Prot- 
estant Church stand. The battles of the Ref- 



202 The Christianity of Christ 

ormation may have to be fought again ; but it 
is no breach of Christian charit}* to fight for 
the truth — to contend earnestly for the faith 
once for all delivered to the saints. 

For the rest, the attempt of Loisy to put the 
worship of Christ and the worship of saints 
on the same level, as being equally foreign to 
the gospel and equally the fruit of development, 
can mislead nobody. In this book we have an 
example of a bright, strong, cultivated mind, 
sensitive to the currents of truth that are blow- 
ing through the modern world, but hopeless- 
ly entangled with an outworn ecclesiasticism, 
struggling to justify itself in an indefensible 
position of which it has become at least par- 
tially conscious. It has a certain theological 
value as a criticism of the opposite extreme; 
but its chief value is as a psychological uncov- 
ering of the refuge of lies. 



INDEXES 



INDEX 

OF AUTHORS QUOTED OR REFERRED TO 



Anselm, 33. 
Arnold, Matthew, 27. 

Beet, J. Agar, 47, 48, 1 78-1 81 . 
Briggs, C. A., 54. 
Brown, W. Adams, 4, 7. 
Bruce, A. B., 48. 

Caird, Edward, 6. 
Caird, John, 6. 
Charles, R. H., 193, 193. 
Clarke, W. N., 19. 

Davidson, A. B., 17, 
Davison, W. T., 173-178. 
Delitzsch, Friedrich, 7. 
Dennej, James, 25, 38. 
Driver, S. R., 158. 

Ewald, G. H. A., 98. 

Fairbairn, A. M., 6. 

Gilbert, G. H., 31. 
Grotius, Hugo, 33, 103. 

Hastings, J., Dictionary of 

the Bible, 48. 
Haeckel, Ernst, 6. 



Harnack, Adolf, 4, 6, 7, 22, 

29, 111-113, 132, 133. 
Hase, K., 98, 99. 
Hegel, G. W. F., 7. 
Hermann, W., 6. 
Hilprecht, H. V., 7. 
Holtzmann, A., 98. 
Hommel, Fritz, 7, 159. 
Huxlej, T. H., 96. 

Julicher, A., 113, 114, 123, 
124, 125. 

Kaftan, Julius, 6, 69. 
Kant, Immanuel, 7. 
Kennedy, H. A A., 17. 
Keim, K. T., 43, 44, 99, 103, 

140. 
Kuinoel, C. T., 103. 

Leibnitz, G. W., 7. 

Loisy, Alfred, 4, 7, 13, 29, 

196-202. 
Locke, John, 20. 
Loofs, Friedrich, 168, 173. 
Lotze, Hermann, 7. 

Mathews, Shailer, 148. 

(205) 



2C6 



Index 



McCurdj, J. F., 7, 158. 
Mejer, H. A. W., 46, 47, loi, 
103, 104, 149. 

Newman, J. H., 12. 

Orr, James, 48. 

Pfleiderer, Otto, 123, 128, 

129, 185-195. 
Plummer, Alfred, 99, 105. 
Pope, W. Burt, 168. 

Rainy, Robert, 114, 115. 
Randies, Marshall, 172. 
Renan, Ernest, 96. 
Ritschl, Albrecht, 6, 69. 
Rogers, R. W., 7, 158. 

Sanday, W., 35, 98. 
Sajce, A. H., 7, 158, 159. 
Schleiermacher, F. D. E., 
69, 167. 



Smith, George Adam, 162, 

163. 
Smith, Goldwin, 6. 
Smith, W. Robertson, 165, 

166. 
Spencer, Herbert, 96. 
Stephens, D. S., 172. 
Stevens, G. B., 36. 
Strauss, D. F., 96, 187. 

Thajer, J. H, 33- 

Weiss, Bernhard, 38. 

Weizsacker, K., 98. 

Wendt, H. H„ 31. 

Wernle, Paul, 72, 81, 89, 
115, 116, 119-122, 123, 128, 
129, 132, 133, 140, 141-143, 
145, 191. 

Wesley, John, 166. 

Westcott and Hort, 167. 



INDEX 

OF SCRIPTURE PASSAGES QUOTED OR 
EXPLAINED 



Deut. viii. 3, 



Psalm xvi , . . 
Psalm xlix. . , 
Psalm Ixxiii. . 
Psalm cxxxix 



Isaiah ix. 6, 7 



Matt. iv. 4... 
Matt. iv. S... 
Mutt. iv. 17. . 
Matt. V. 13, 14 
Matt. vii. 21- 
Matt. viii. lo-i 
Matt. xi. II 
Matt. xi. 27 
Matt. xi. 25-30 

99 
Matt. xii. 40. 
Matt. xvi. 13 
Matt. xvi. 17 
Matt. xvi. 21 
Matt. XX. 28. 
Matt. xxi. 33-44 
Matt. xxi. 41, 42 



PAGE 

. . .77 



17 



..77 

••94 

..94 

.134 

..30 

•134 

..48 

.•30 

31.97.98 

100-105, 130 

.42 



139 
.18 

139 
.33 
113-133 
....130 



PAGE 

Matt. xxi. 44 62 

Matt. xxvi. 28 34 

Matt, xxvi 39, 42, 44.... 77 

Matt. xxvi. 61 41 

Matt, xxvii.40 41 

Mark x. 45 33 

Mark xiv. 36. . . 77 

Mark xiv. 58 41 

Mark xv. 29, 30 41 

Luke iv. 4 77 

Luke x. 17-20 loi 

Luke X. 21-24 30,97,98 

100, 101-104, 130 

Luke XV. 1 1-32 26 

Luke XX. 18 62 

Luke xxii.42 77 

Luke xxiv. 39 40 

Luke xxiv. 42, 43 40 

John ii. 19 41 

John iv. 33 71 

John iv. 34----69. 7i. 7^,94 

John V. 23 106 

John x. 30 106 

(207) 



2o8 



Index 



PAGE 

John xii. 45 106 

John xii. 48 13 

John xi V. 9 106 

John xi V. 30 77 

John XX. 27 41 

John XX, 29 41 

John xxi. 12-15 40 

Acts ii. 24-36 38 

Acts iii. 15, 21 38 

Acts iv. 2 38 

Acts X. 40, 41 39 

Acts xiii. 30-37 38 

Acts xvii. 18 38 

Acts xviii. 18 136 

Rom. iii. 24 25 

Rom. iii. 25 35 

Rom. V.8 36 

Rom. xiv. 17 49 

I Cor. i.30 25 

I Cor. ii.2 136 

I Cor. ii. 9, ID 19, 167 

I Cor. ii. II 20 

I Cor. iii. 11 46-48, 147 

149, 165 



PAGE 

I Cor. XV. 3 147 

I Cor. XV. 5-S 40 

I Cor. XV. 1 2-20 43 

I Cor. XV. 24 97 

1 Cor. xvi. 22 62 

2 Cor. xi. 22-28 144 

2 Cor. xiii. 14 21 

Gal. \ 9 62 

Eph. i. 7 25 

Phil. ii. 5-11 118 

Col. i. 14 25 

I Thess. i. I 109 

I Thess. i. 2-5 no 

I Thess. i. 6 no 

I Thess. i. 9, 10 in 

Heb. ii. 17 34 

Heb.v. 7 80 

I John ii. 2 34 

I John iv. 8 24. 

I John iv. 10 34, 35 

I John iv. 10, II 50 

I John iv. 16 24 

I John iv. 19 50 



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